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Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended

Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.’ Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information. Fuck you google.

laserlight 9mo ago
It upsets me to see YouTube Premium apologists despite all the hostile moves by YouTube. YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. They won't forget sugarcoating ads as being “unobtrusive” or “environment-supporting” or whatever. But guess what? If you don't want to see them, you can upgrade to YouTube Premium Plus and continue being an apologist.
- wiseowise 9mo ago
  But think how hard it is for them to earn money to make up for all the billions they’ve used to create de facto monopoly in video space? Won’t someone think of poor capitalists trying to squeeze the niche dry?
- mschuster91 9mo ago
  > YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate. All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
    While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins. ‘YouTube is failing because free tier is too expensive to be offset by ads’ and ‘YouTube premium is overly expensive’ can both be true. Shareholders care about maximising profits now, not overall product longevity.
    - mschuster91 9mo ago
      > While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins. Agree in principle, but I'd raise the serious question if Youtube is profitable in the first place. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded [1], so the storage growth given 1.5 GB/h is at least (not including compression, duplication across multiple DCs, edge nodes, whatever) 750 GB / minute, 45 TB / hour or 1.080 TB / day. At 10 $/TB (and that is a figure from before the AI boom making all costs explode) they have to spend 10.800 $ per day just in HDD costs, on top of that comes the server hardware, racks, switches, datacenter construction costs, and then the cost of running all of that - electricity for the servers, cooling, internet egress bandwidth (in total, all video sites made up 65% traffic of the entire Internet pre-AI boom). It is estimated that YT makes about 36 billion $ of revenue [3], assuming a split of 50/50 with creators [4] that means 18 billion $ end up in Youtube as gross revenue. From that, take off 10% for music licenses (estimated [5]), 25% for taxes (assuming for simplicity an average 20% corporate tax plus 5% VAT), that leaves 11.7 billion $. And that's... not that much, given that R&D, infrastructure investment, advertising expenses, costs of preferential deals with device manufacturers and phone carriers ("zero rating"), operational expenses (i.e. electricity, bandwidth) and headcount (moderation!) haven't been taken into account. In the end, I think that unlike 2015 [6] Youtube is actually profitable - but barely, nowhere near close to the profit margins of Google Ads. Certainly not enough to appeal to the stonk markets and beancounters, and that is what drives the ever increasing push for ads and premium. As a side question... I think what irks Google the most is that individual "influencers" can make millions of dollars in monthly income from sponsorships but Google sees nothing of that money at all. [1] https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-upload... [2] https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-bandwidth-internet-traffic-report-streaming-video-youtube-netflix/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-ba... [3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ [4] https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-youtube-tiktok-and-other-social-platforms/ https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-y... [5] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html [6] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-google-any-money-2015-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go...
- slig 9mo ago
  >When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. We'll see. Until then, it's cheap and works fine.
  - laserlight 9mo ago
    It used to be cheaper and work finer.
    - lern_too_spel 9mo ago
      It used to be cheaper, sure, but finer?
      - laserlight 9mo ago
        At the very least, background playback used to work.
        lern_too_spel 9mo ago
        Does background playback not now work in Premium?
aembleton 9mo ago
> Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades What basic browser function is that? Video playback with the video tag? It's only been around for about 15 years and mainstream for 10 years.
- antisol 9mo ago
  This is disingenuous - we were all watching flash video for about a decade before that. And before that we were watching (terrible ~160x120) video in realvideo* or asf format using browser plugins, since maybe 1997-1998, certainly before 2000. * tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
    You could watch those in backgrounder windows/tabs too.
    - aembleton 9mo ago
      You still can.

laserlight 9mo ago

It upsets me to see YouTube Premium apologists despite all the hostile moves by YouTube. YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. They won't forget sugarcoating ads as being “unobtrusive” or “environment-supporting” or whatever. But guess what? If you don't want to see them, you can upgrade to YouTube Premium Plus and continue being an apologist.

wiseowise 9mo ago
But think how hard it is for them to earn money to make up for all the billions they’ve used to create de facto monopoly in video space? Won’t someone think of poor capitalists trying to squeeze the niche dry?
mschuster91 9mo ago
> YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate. All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
  While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins. ‘YouTube is failing because free tier is too expensive to be offset by ads’ and ‘YouTube premium is overly expensive’ can both be true. Shareholders care about maximising profits now, not overall product longevity.
  - mschuster91 9mo ago
    > While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins. Agree in principle, but I'd raise the serious question if Youtube is profitable in the first place. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded [1], so the storage growth given 1.5 GB/h is at least (not including compression, duplication across multiple DCs, edge nodes, whatever) 750 GB / minute, 45 TB / hour or 1.080 TB / day. At 10 $/TB (and that is a figure from before the AI boom making all costs explode) they have to spend 10.800 $ per day just in HDD costs, on top of that comes the server hardware, racks, switches, datacenter construction costs, and then the cost of running all of that - electricity for the servers, cooling, internet egress bandwidth (in total, all video sites made up 65% traffic of the entire Internet pre-AI boom). It is estimated that YT makes about 36 billion $ of revenue [3], assuming a split of 50/50 with creators [4] that means 18 billion $ end up in Youtube as gross revenue. From that, take off 10% for music licenses (estimated [5]), 25% for taxes (assuming for simplicity an average 20% corporate tax plus 5% VAT), that leaves 11.7 billion $. And that's... not that much, given that R&D, infrastructure investment, advertising expenses, costs of preferential deals with device manufacturers and phone carriers ("zero rating"), operational expenses (i.e. electricity, bandwidth) and headcount (moderation!) haven't been taken into account. In the end, I think that unlike 2015 [6] Youtube is actually profitable - but barely, nowhere near close to the profit margins of Google Ads. Certainly not enough to appeal to the stonk markets and beancounters, and that is what drives the ever increasing push for ads and premium. As a side question... I think what irks Google the most is that individual "influencers" can make millions of dollars in monthly income from sponsorships but Google sees nothing of that money at all. [1] https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-upload... [2] https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-bandwidth-internet-traffic-report-streaming-video-youtube-netflix/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-ba... [3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/ [4] https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-youtube-tiktok-and-other-social-platforms/ https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-y... [5] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html [6] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-google-any-money-2015-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go...
slig 9mo ago
>When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. We'll see. Until then, it's cheap and works fine.
- laserlight 9mo ago
  It used to be cheaper and work finer.
  - lern_too_spel 9mo ago
    It used to be cheaper, sure, but finer?
    - laserlight 9mo ago
      At the very least, background playback used to work.
      - lern_too_spel 9mo ago
        Does background playback not now work in Premium?

aembleton 9mo ago

> Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades What basic browser function is that? Video playback with the video tag? It's only been around for about 15 years and mainstream for 10 years.

antisol 9mo ago
This is disingenuous - we were all watching flash video for about a decade before that. And before that we were watching (terrible ~160x120) video in realvideo* or asf format using browser plugins, since maybe 1997-1998, certainly before 2000. * tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
  You could watch those in backgrounder windows/tabs too.
  - aembleton 9mo ago
    You still can.