5 ms·

YouTube provides their content for free. They just don't want to provide that content without strings attached, they want to force their users to watch advertis

YouTube provides their content for free. They just don't want to provide that content without strings attached, they want to force their users to watch advertising. The only way to provide content for free, yet force users to watch advertising, is to lock down users' computers and remove their freedom to control their own computing. That's what most HN users are against, as it goes against the philosophy of free software [0]. If YouTube doesn't want to provide free content, they have all the liberty in the world to remove free content from their site and provide it only for YouTube Premium users. But they don't want to do that, they want to have their cake and eat it too. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

morbia 4y ago
> If YouTube doesn't want to provide free content, they have all the liberty in the world to remove free content from their site and provide it only for YouTube Premium users. But they don't want to do that, they want to have their cake and eat it too. If you believe in the philosophy of free software to the letter YouTube can't do as you suggest. If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others. That undermines their entire business model.
- stavros 4y ago
  I don't agree that this is true, you don't have to have free content to have FOSS devices, but sometimes your business model doesn't work. I'm not obligated to buy your stuff.
  - morbia 4y ago
    When you say 'free content' do you mean free as in beer or free as in freedom? I agree that 'free as in beer' is not required for a 'foss device', but I don't see how you can have content which is not 'free as in freedom' on a foss device. Without DRM and licensing restrictions, how can YouTube prevent premium users sharing that content with non-paying individuals? To be clear I am not saying it is right or wrong, just a statement of facts. All I am suggesting is that both business models (ad supported free (beer) content or paid subscriptions) do not respect free software principles. Either way, you are restricting what a user can do with that content.
    - stavros 4y ago
      But this is like saying "how can you have non-free things in a supermarket, when anyone can put them in a pocket and leave?" The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will.
      - morbia 4y ago
        I don't understand that analogy. I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security, and laws form a deterrent. Sure, we could say that violates my freedom to take what I want (and it does) but trading some liberties are what allows us to have a civilised society where we don't all steal from each other. > The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will. Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals? Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time. Again, and I want to stress this, I'm not saying it's 'right' or defending YouTube's business practices. I just don't see how either business model can be reconcilled with the Free Software principles.
        stavros 4y ago
        > I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security And I've never seen a video streaming site that just gave you links to download the videos. They all have some degree of security, but no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry. > Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals? No, I'm suggesting that not everyone would steal it, in te same way that not everyone shoplifts now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the convenience of Netflix over torrents is so great for the average person, that they'd keep paying even if there was no DRM on Netflix, because > Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time.
        morbia 4y ago
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others That's not true, as content is not software.
- falcor84 4y ago
  I don't think that this is a real problem. There's nothing stopping you from downloading a video and emailing it to a few friends, but there's no viable alternative to YouTube as a video distribution platform. If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options? Torrenting is the only real solution that comes to my mind, but that only works for the most in demand media. If you want the long tail, then as I see it, YouTube's (or similarly Facebook's) infrastructure offers the only viable solution, and there's no alternative to paying them for maintaining this infrastructure, either via ads, or via a subscription.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options? I also want to be able to feed, shelter, and educate the whole world without having to worry about costs, but I have no options.
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      Not on your own you don't. https://giphy.com/gifs/arispool-communism-ferengi-ferengigang-WwCyCAJr4ltsehjMc2 https://giphy.com/gifs/arispool-communism-ferengi-ferengigan...
b112 4y ago
Old school TV, and cable companies, lost this argument looong ago. Commercial skipping by a variety of products was challenged in court ; they lost. They also lost before commerical skipping existed, in the 80s, when they tried, and again failed to get VHS recording of live TV banned, because you could fast forward through the commercials. Before that, there were attempts to make it illegal to record songs off of the radio, going back to the 70s! So many attempts were made at this, that many countries have legislation which makes recording off of TV, for personal use, specifically legal. Democracy has spoken. In other words, youtube's model of injecting commecial content into freely viewable media, and hoping people won't modify it to their tastes, is a proven failed business model. Any executive which thinks this is the path, and they one can legally enforce it, is literally delusional and unfit to ply their trade. All their hand-wavy attempts to get around this, via encryption, via copyright have also failed repeatedly. This business model is still alive, but control of endpoint is dead, dead, dead.
- nomel 4y ago
  > is a proven failed business model. Except in this case, where it’s a proven successful business model.
- public_defender 4y ago
  I think you're wrong. I'm a big advocate of open computing, but I think that endpoint autonomy is in as much danger as it ever was, if not more. You're describing that legal challenges to market-based or grassroots ad skipping etc. have failed, but consider that the legal route is out of fashion. What companies do now is sell a locked device. See windows on ARM, safetynet, [whatever apple is doing]. I love this click-to-root hack, but it's really a "play 2009 games, win 2009 prizes" situation. Good luck trying this on a game console or an Amazon echo.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Don't know about Echo, but I just jailbroke and wiped an Amazon Fire Stick and installed TWRP and LineageOS on it. The exploit to unlock the bootloader has been patched in the latest firmware, but I don't see the arms race ending any time soon.
Kiro 4y ago
I don't understand your point. A lot of people are OK with watching YouTube with ads, and the rest can pay for YouTube Premium. Why would they remove free content?
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  The parent comment was talking about YouTube Premium as a better solution to the ad problem, implying that jailbreaking your system for the purpose of disabling ads is somehow bad. I explained how jailbreaking is actually just taking control of your computing, since YouTube already provides the content for free, and wants to monetize it by taking the control away from the users. YouTube could monetize their content with YouTube Premium without taking the control away from the users, by means of not letting anyone view the content without paying. But they do not want to do that, as providing content for free is what made YouTube popular in the first place. So they lock down the users' machines.
Gormo 4y ago
> YouTube provides their content for free. But YouTube provides very little content of their own. They are primarily a hosting platform used by third-party content providers. If YouTube doesn't want to make content accessible for free anymore, it would undermine the use case of the vast majority of people who use it to distribute their own content. I don't know what their finances and operations look like internally, but I suspect that the revenue they are bringing is enough for them to operate very much in the black, despite some proportion of their audience blocking ads, just as traditional broadcast TV networks have been profitable for decades without having nay mechanism to ensure that viewers are watching commercials. Perhaps YouTube should just accept that ad blocking is part of the market landscape they operate it, and plan their monetization around reasonable estimates of the actual reach of their ads with blocking taken into account. Potentially undermining their core business model just to increase ad viewership by a few percentage points doesn't seem like a sound strategy.

morbia 4y ago

> If YouTube doesn't want to provide free content, they have all the liberty in the world to remove free content from their site and provide it only for YouTube Premium users. But they don't want to do that, they want to have their cake and eat it too. If you believe in the philosophy of free software to the letter YouTube can't do as you suggest. If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others. That undermines their entire business model.

stavros 4y ago
I don't agree that this is true, you don't have to have free content to have FOSS devices, but sometimes your business model doesn't work. I'm not obligated to buy your stuff.
- morbia 4y ago
  When you say 'free content' do you mean free as in beer or free as in freedom? I agree that 'free as in beer' is not required for a 'foss device', but I don't see how you can have content which is not 'free as in freedom' on a foss device. Without DRM and licensing restrictions, how can YouTube prevent premium users sharing that content with non-paying individuals? To be clear I am not saying it is right or wrong, just a statement of facts. All I am suggesting is that both business models (ad supported free (beer) content or paid subscriptions) do not respect free software principles. Either way, you are restricting what a user can do with that content.
  - stavros 4y ago
    But this is like saying "how can you have non-free things in a supermarket, when anyone can put them in a pocket and leave?" The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will.
    - morbia 4y ago
      I don't understand that analogy. I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security, and laws form a deterrent. Sure, we could say that violates my freedom to take what I want (and it does) but trading some liberties are what allows us to have a civilised society where we don't all steal from each other. > The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will. Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals? Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time. Again, and I want to stress this, I'm not saying it's 'right' or defending YouTube's business practices. I just don't see how either business model can be reconcilled with the Free Software principles.
      - stavros 4y ago
        > I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security And I've never seen a video streaming site that just gave you links to download the videos. They all have some degree of security, but no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry. > Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals? No, I'm suggesting that not everyone would steal it, in te same way that not everyone shoplifts now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the convenience of Netflix over torrents is so great for the average person, that they'd keep paying even if there was no DRM on Netflix, because > Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time.
        morbia 4y ago
bheadmaster 4y ago
> If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others That's not true, as content is not software.
falcor84 4y ago
I don't think that this is a real problem. There's nothing stopping you from downloading a video and emailing it to a few friends, but there's no viable alternative to YouTube as a video distribution platform. If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options? Torrenting is the only real solution that comes to my mind, but that only works for the most in demand media. If you want the long tail, then as I see it, YouTube's (or similarly Facebook's) infrastructure offers the only viable solution, and there's no alternative to paying them for maintaining this infrastructure, either via ads, or via a subscription.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options? I also want to be able to feed, shelter, and educate the whole world without having to worry about costs, but I have no options.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Not on your own you don't. https://giphy.com/gifs/arispool-communism-ferengi-ferengigang-WwCyCAJr4ltsehjMc2 https://giphy.com/gifs/arispool-communism-ferengi-ferengigan...

b112 4y ago

Old school TV, and cable companies, lost this argument looong ago. Commercial skipping by a variety of products was challenged in court ; they lost. They also lost before commerical skipping existed, in the 80s, when they tried, and again failed to get VHS recording of live TV banned, because you could fast forward through the commercials. Before that, there were attempts to make it illegal to record songs off of the radio, going back to the 70s! So many attempts were made at this, that many countries have legislation which makes recording off of TV, for personal use, specifically legal. Democracy has spoken. In other words, youtube's model of injecting commecial content into freely viewable media, and hoping people won't modify it to their tastes, is a proven failed business model. Any executive which thinks this is the path, and they one can legally enforce it, is literally delusional and unfit to ply their trade. All their hand-wavy attempts to get around this, via encryption, via copyright have also failed repeatedly. This business model is still alive, but control of endpoint is dead, dead, dead.

nomel 4y ago
> is a proven failed business model. Except in this case, where it’s a proven successful business model.
public_defender 4y ago
I think you're wrong. I'm a big advocate of open computing, but I think that endpoint autonomy is in as much danger as it ever was, if not more. You're describing that legal challenges to market-based or grassroots ad skipping etc. have failed, but consider that the legal route is out of fashion. What companies do now is sell a locked device. See windows on ARM, safetynet, [whatever apple is doing]. I love this click-to-root hack, but it's really a "play 2009 games, win 2009 prizes" situation. Good luck trying this on a game console or an Amazon echo.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  Don't know about Echo, but I just jailbroke and wiped an Amazon Fire Stick and installed TWRP and LineageOS on it. The exploit to unlock the bootloader has been patched in the latest firmware, but I don't see the arms race ending any time soon.

Kiro 4y ago

I don't understand your point. A lot of people are OK with watching YouTube with ads, and the rest can pay for YouTube Premium. Why would they remove free content?

bheadmaster 4y ago
The parent comment was talking about YouTube Premium as a better solution to the ad problem, implying that jailbreaking your system for the purpose of disabling ads is somehow bad. I explained how jailbreaking is actually just taking control of your computing, since YouTube already provides the content for free, and wants to monetize it by taking the control away from the users. YouTube could monetize their content with YouTube Premium without taking the control away from the users, by means of not letting anyone view the content without paying. But they do not want to do that, as providing content for free is what made YouTube popular in the first place. So they lock down the users' machines.

Gormo 4y ago

> YouTube provides their content for free. But YouTube provides very little content of their own. They are primarily a hosting platform used by third-party content providers. If YouTube doesn't want to make content accessible for free anymore, it would undermine the use case of the vast majority of people who use it to distribute their own content. I don't know what their finances and operations look like internally, but I suspect that the revenue they are bringing is enough for them to operate very much in the black, despite some proportion of their audience blocking ads, just as traditional broadcast TV networks have been profitable for decades without having nay mechanism to ensure that viewers are watching commercials. Perhaps YouTube should just accept that ad blocking is part of the market landscape they operate it, and plan their monetization around reasonable estimates of the actual reach of their ads with blocking taken into account. Potentially undermining their core business model just to increase ad viewership by a few percentage points doesn't seem like a sound strategy.