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Unpopular opinion here but service providers should be allowed to enforce whatever conditions they want (within the law) for accessing and using their service.
There are plenty of other video hosting services. If you don't like what YouTube is doing, don't use their service. Not sure why people feel entitled to free content AND the ability to keep them from earning revenue.
The expectation of free content with no revenue stream attached is unsustainable. Pay for the content, or let them monetize it
And this is coming from someone who runs pi-hole on their network for security reasons.
There's a problem when they have a sort of diagonal integration into the industry, as they're kind of pulling up the ropes from competition while monetizing the product. It reeks of looming antitrust.
If I want to distribute billions of videos to billions of people on my own site, that'd be great, but my options are basically to pay Google, Amazon, or Microsoft for help.
I'm happy to talk about antitrust and breaking up conglomerates. But that needs to be a big conversation across many industries not just "Google bad, grrr".
If you're referencing WEI, btw, it is one of the topics people have been most misled about. Can link you to my Mastodon thread where I break down all the misunderstanding if you'd like
There's no overarching anti-trust conversation to be had because there's currently no anti-trust cases, if there ever will be. The comments under each individual instance of it being required is the "big conversation". As a content aggregation site (mainly news) the only place it could realistically occur is under some wishful thinking self-post nobody would care about.
I also saw people pine for trust busting just the other day under some Amazon article, there's simply nowhere else to post about it at the moment.
I meant to say that I'm much more inclined to have conversations with people about the need for stricter antitrust laws and enforcement than I am about a single subsidiary of a multinational corp. protecting their revenue stream
It's all about ads/ad money/data, it's heavily bleeding into a single issue. It's not like some giant manufacturing company doing shady things with their cars and air conditioners, all the subsidiaries are interlinked. You could say WEI is just a Chrome thing, Google is just their search engine, AdWords is just an ad service etc, but they're all part of the data to ads to sales pipeline.
And as long as users expect free content there will be a continued need to monetize their usage. That's not inherently bad.
Also, WEI is about so so so much more than ad blockers and DRM. Like, so much more. And the spec has nothing to do with Chrome/Google. They are just the first implementers of both sides of equation (browser feature + attester) and only works on Android right now because attestation comes from the OS. They did it for Google Play Services. Nothing else.
So basically they're using their monopoly to force through changes in internet standards? Sounds like the EU will be paying a visit soon.
My dude, do you even understand the technical details of WEI or are you regurgitating what the Internet has told you? Have you read the spec? They are not forcing anything. Nobody has to opt in. It's not even available outside of Android and right now it's only being used for Google's own products (Google Play Services specifically)
Please don't talk like you know what the deal is when you do obviously don't
They are not forcing anything. Nobody has to opt in.
This is exactly what they did with .webp
Ah yes, I remember that time when the Internet stopped allowing gifs, jpgs, and pngs. Now Firefox crashes whenever it tries to load an image other than a webp because Google made them /s
I don't understand this comment at all. Hosting your own video is actually super easy. HTML5 video is as simple as HTML5 images. It's just the cost factor.
You can do it all without the cloud as well, you just have to actually go buy the servers or rent them from traditional virtual private server hosts. Not everyone has gone to the cloud.
Yes please recreate YouTube with html5 And make sure a billion users can access billions of videos at all times with your static HTML site.
You said on your own site. The fact that YouTube exists and makes that easier isn't the argument against YouTube you think it is...
Nothing about that tag requires the site to be static either, but whatever.
I'm not going to converse with you further because you do not know what you're talking about 👍
As a professional software engineer with a background in scalable web infrastructure...
The video player is done for you by the browser (unless you insist on dressing it up). Hosting a video is the same as hosting any file. If you've already got a website that can host content for billions, there's not a major problem other than storage and bandwidth costs.
You can say I don't know what I'm talking about until the cows come home, but all you've done is make completely unsubstantiated claims about how you can't possibly do this yourself, meanwhile I can say for a fact plenty of sites host their own video just fine.
Hosting billions of videos "on your own site" would be a bit silly though.
Yes tell me more about load balancing
It is very clear you are quite green in this field.
🤦♂️
What's your HTML5 plan for when your site goes down because one of the videos a user uploads to your site goes viral and is receiving ~10,000 requests every second across 6 continents?
That's a trick (and a completely different) question from:
If I want to distribute billions of videos to billions of people on my own site, that’d be great, but my options are basically to pay Google, Amazon, or Microsoft for help.
If you assuming this is a load spike well above your maximum throughput, you just fall over. That's the reason the cloud took off in the first place; if you do it the old fashioned way, you can get overwhelmed and have no recourse but to fall over because you can't provision servers fast enough.
If this is a "normal" occurrence, you're probably talking about round-robin'd DNS distributing to (hopefully) the nearest data center where you have a load balancer, then that could hit another layer of load balancing on the machine or directly go to servers on the machine depending on how you have things setup, then that could hit several different designs of web server with their own quirks (asyncio -- non-preemptive multitasking --, threaded -- preemptive multitasking --, single threaded, or some mix thereof depending on your design -- pros and cons to all of them).
Those could do several things depending on how fast your data centers become consistent WRT uploaded videos. We'll just assume you already have a copy of the video in each regional data center. You fetch from there and serve the file, like any other file.
... or maybe you get really fancy and use WebRTC to get the files from clients already watching the video.
But please, add another surprise requirement and continue to strawman.
EDIT: Oh neat, found out after the fact PeerTube actually does that WebRTC trick https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#the-peertube-player :)
It's a lot more complicated than that because they are not entirely service providers, but service facilitators. They do not make the content, they merely distribute it, so they are only responsible for part of the service provided.
The result of this is that independent content creators often only upload their content to YouTube and not its competitors because it's the most popular platform, which means that consumers are forced to go to YouTube in order to get the content from those independent creators, which makes the platform more popular, so more independent creators only upload there...
I would be inclined to agree with you if we had half a dozen competing video sharing services that creators all uploaded to, but as it is now, YouTube has an almost-monopoly and they're squeezing hard because they can. If YouTube didn't exist, it fould allow better services to exist. They don't exist in a vacuum.
Okay, but those independent content creators are often doing this trying to make money.
YouTube actually does have a pretty fair deal for "if you make us lose money, we won't charge you" and "if you make us money, we'll give you 55%." That includes increased revenue to those creators if you are a YouTube premium subscriber.
Getting in the way of monetization here isn't just hitting Google's bottom line, it's hitting those creators using Google's platform as well.
I used ad blockers for YEARS until YouTube added a paid option and once I started using YouTube more (again) I went for that option quickly. I switched my mentally a few years ago to "if it's not worth paying for, it's not worth it" and that cleared a lot up for me in terms of priorities.
An aside but, I'm extremely annoyed with the pro-piracy, sentiment against paid game mods, and general attitude against paying people money for the work they're doing attitude, that I've seen on Lemmy (and in gaming communities) recently. It's like everyone wants to be paid a six figure salary when it comes to their life and then they want to get everything they enjoy on a computer for free.
YouTube premium is as much as some professional streaming services. It's an insane price. Creators get (depending on who you ask) somewhere between $0.003 and $0.018 per view with ads, so with 55% of premium going to creators ($7.7/mo), you'd have to watch between 428 and 2,567 videos per month. That's a fucking LOT.
If we say 1000/mo and 10 minute videos, that's 5.5 hours of YouTube per day. Not even most NEETs are at that level.
The hell are you talking about? Premium is $13.99/mo, removed all ads, includes YouTube Music with all it's licensed music, among other things. What exactly does your math represent? The amount of hours you'd need to watch to generate revenue equal to the cost of the service? That's a ridiculous thing to base your calculation on. If you think watching ads is such a better value than Premium then watch the damn ads?
Like, this is basic supply and demand economics. They know that there is less tolerance for ads in terms of exchange of value so the "cost of the service" when payment is in ad viewing time is less than the upfront cost if you get premium. That is really simple economics.
I'm saying that they charge you way more money to avoid ads than they get from the ads because consumers have learned to expect such prices from professional streaming services, while the price has no actual justification other than that people are ignorant enough to pay it.
You are describing supply and demand. Not much more to it than that. Demand for ad free services is greater than demand from advertisers. What's your point?
You're free to be indignant about the ad industry and other people's willingness to pay for services at this or that price point but at least call a spade a spade.
I have premium for YouTube Music, and because they have certain music I can't get elsewhere, so I get a better YouTube experience and a music streaming service for about the same price I'd pay for just Spotify. I'm satisfied with my purchase and the value I get from it.
Why are you assuming that supply and demand is automatically an ethical system for pricing? Just look at American medication prices.
Except American medication prices a) aren't supply and demand; they involve manufactured scarcity among other serious problems and b) are a matter of life and death in many cases; they deal with necessities
There are many things that should not be capitalist: education, healthcare, prisons, to name just a few
The pricing of funny Internet videos et al is not one of those things, and it's frankly inappropriate to make that comparison here. You think the ethics of lifesaving medication and YouTube videos are comparable? Gimme a break
And charging an exorbitant amount of money for ad-free videos because you have a monopoly isn't how, exactly?
In both cases, they charge what will maximize profits because it's what consumers are willing to pay, not the actual value of the product. YouTube Premium doesn't cost $500/mo because it's not life-saving, but it's still way more expensive than it should be because like patented medication, they have no real competitors.
There is a difference between monopolies and anti-trust. It is not, nor should it be, illegal to be the only serious contender in a given category.
If I make widgets for arcade machines so well that I drive all the other arcade machine widget makers out of business, that's normal commerce.
Antitrust is when I gain and maintain that advantage through specific practices detailed in the legal code
Monopolies are only broken up when it is of grave public interest to do so. There are industries I believe have monopoly/duopoly problems and should be broken up. "Hosting videos on the Internet" is not one of them.
Again, trying to say "pharmaceuticals shouldn't be an oligarchy/monopoly, which is proof that nothing should be" is not good logic
You should look into the history and breakup of the Bell telephone company for context on when a monopoly is broken up and why
How are you defining "should be" anyway? Your personal opinion? What profit margins should be considered okay and for which products or services?
You need to pick which things are important enough to forcibly break up, and everything after that is fair game, regardless of what you think is healthy for the market. Otherwise you're just talking about "I don't like the leadership of that company, they're bad people" at which point your problem is about, like, specific people's ethics.
I hate that those people succeed, and there are things I think we can do to mitigate those problems, but "Google bad, don't let them secure their products or help others secure theirs" ain't it homie
It's a fact that YouTube pays out more to creators per view for a subscriber than for an ad user, and in the words of LinusTechTips (despite the current backlash he had literally no reason to lie), it's "a lot more."
It may actually be the case that it's a pool of money that's distributed based on what parts of the YouTube service you use. So if you watch 100% Mr. Beast, 55% of your subscription goes to Mr. Beast... I really don't know how that works, it's not to my knowledge clearly explained.
If you don't believe Mr. Beast deserves 7.7/mo or so, then you're welcome to use ads or see if Mr. Beast will upload his content somewhere else.
The fact of the matter is though, it really isn't a scam for creators where YouTube just milks them for profits in an unfair exchange. They get an entire professionally hosted platform for free the entire time they grow, they get their old videos hosted indefinitely, and they pay nothing for that service. They could quit tomorrow, start losing YouTube money on heaps of 4k video, and be on the hook $0.
I'm not saying that it's a scam for creators. I don't want to support YouTube financially because of their rampant enshittification and algorithm that promotes divisiveness and political polarization. If there were multiple equally viable alternatives, at least some of them would have better policies and less enshittification than YouTube.
Because their revenue stream comes entirely from destroying our privacy throughout the entire internet?