If rolled out widely, this would make web browsers and third-party YouTube clients without a DRM license unusable for YouTube playback, download, etc. This would include almost all open-source web browsers and almost all third-party YouTube clients. Archive link to reddit post about this
How to kill YouTube in one stupid step.
I guess their CEO wasn’t paying attention when the music industry got trounced by pirating.
Why would it kill YouTube?
Spotify has DRM for all of their songs, it has not killed music streaming.
What this actually does is make it formally illegal to rip YouTube videos (circumventing DRM is against DMCA). It’s also a shot against youtube-dlp, which refuses to cross the line of cracking the DRM, which would be doable, but they don’t want to on account of the legal issue.
How exactly will this kill YouTube? This will only kill ad blockers.
Nah, maybe some people will switch ad blockers off, but for most, the msin takeaway will be to look for a competing service.
You vastly overestimate people’s tech savviness.
And you vastly underestimate the value Youtube would lose if the tech-savvy segment of their audience went elsewhere.
Those left behind are a different market. Youtube creators would have to dumb themselves down even further, driving even more worthwhile content off the service. Soon Youtube would be the Facebook of video sites, geared towards a shrinking population of people too old and stubborn to move on.
I say YT should absolutely shoot themselves in the foot like this.
What competing service
Other entertainment. If Youtube makes my head hurt, I’ll go touch grass, watch a movie, read some news, play boardgames, etc.
And if one can’t get out of their phone, then there is Tiktok I guess.
If they were to force a TEE based DRM like Widevine L1, it would likely cause significant issues as there are a considerable amount of devices that don’t support it (for example most PCs).
If they were to use software based DRM like Widevine L3, it would be easy for enthusiasts to crack and the tools for doing so would just get much much better.
Probably not going to kill it, but the number of users and view counts will drop dramatically. The idea is, that it cuts all deadweight users, which reduces Google’s expenses.
Everyone who is allergic to ads, will leave and find their video entertainment elsewhere. As far as those users are concerned, YT will be dead to them.
Those who remain, will either pay up, or have ads shoved down their throats. Line goes up, and shareholders are happy. The money must flow.
As the enshittification of YT has marched towards its terminal stage, many youtubers have already prepared for it by migrating their videos to other platforms. YT doesn’t like tits, so those videos had to go to Onlyfans, Justforfans or whatever. YT doesn’t like guns, so those videos went to Pepperbox. YT doesn’t like providing a steady income to anyone, so many videos went to Nebula. Then there’s also palces like Floatplane, Locals, Playeur etc. I’m sure there are lots of other video platforms too. The way I see it, YT can die, and the fragmented video landscape will only thrive as a result.
Sure, but I still think yall are really overestimating how many people will actually care. You might need to reevaluate your bias. The average person will definitely not change apps or websites. Maybe 1% of users will care to find an alternative for their video needs. And even then, some videos are only on YouTube.
Oh, but here’s the thing. YT is already abusing the people who make the videos. Many of them are already using YT as a platform for promoting their real video platform. They will only upload advertisers friendly watered down versions and mention at the end that if you want to see the real one, head over to one of the countless other platforms they’ve built over the years. All of that is already happening, and it can become a significant factor in the future.
Will it though? Who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If it does, it means that more and more people will migrate to the real video platforms where they can watch the uncut version of every video. I think there’s real potential to shift the video consumption culture from one ad supported platform that abuses everyone involved to several paid platforms, that treat everyone much better.
Youtubers have complained about YT being a horrible landlord for so many years, and yet they can’t leave. They keep trying, but very few succeeded. It’s a shitty situation, but that’s where the audience and the money are.
But now the more edgy videos are gone and the watch time that is attached to them. If you want to watch something that is too spicy for YT, you have to do so somewhere else. The fragmentation has already started.
It won’t kill adblockers, because adblockers don’t circumvent DRM.
DRM in the video feed would allow encrypted ads in the videos, and effectively break normal ad blockers.
Only if there was no client-side decoration/measurement code/links etc to denote that an ad is playing, which there will always be.
It’s basically no different from having in-stream ads today.
It’s very different. It’s not as trivial as you paint it. They can make it as hard as they want to detect.
I’m not making it out to be trivial, but I am realistic about the matter.
You can have in-stream ads to make things ‘unblockable’, but only so long as there’s no other side effects. Any side effects can be detected, that’s really just the reality of the matter.
They went and paid for Spotify.
Like most heavy users of YTP. YouTube will be just fine. Y’all just freeloaders. Pay you cheap bastards.
Already paid in personal data before I was smart enough to try and close the faucet, I don’t see why I should pay more
Because prices change. You can stop using it if you don’t feel the value is there.
Alright, so is my current data worth more or less than my old data? Is my old data worth more or less today than, say, 3 years ago? I don’t see a reason to pay if Google refuses to let people know how much they are worth to them, first.
YouTube was acting a loss leader for years.
Your data has increased in value since then, so has the cost to run the service. These things aren’t some mutually exclusive bubble. This is not how businesses are run, certainly not public traded companies. Many consumers do find the value in a $22/mo video + music sub. We use it a lot.
I have no expectations of a free experience and I get nearly all my families entertainment media via a single subscription. If they raise it beyond my expectations I will steal it or look elsewhere depending on the quality of the content at that time.
But for now, it’s a fantastic service.
I get nearly all my families entertainment media via a single subscription
Jesus christ. You might wanna come up for air, dude
👌
I’d happily pay if youtube stopped falsley demonitizing all the creators I watch. I refuse to give money to copyright trolls. If I pay youtube then youtube just hands a portion of that money to copyright trolls, no questions asked.
Probably explains my looping 403 errors on SmartTube, but it eventually loads after several attempts.
It still isn’t working for me, apart from live streams
SmartTube?
I just let it roll through the 403 “Applying the fix”.error while I did something else. Took maybe 5–10 mins, but started playing and no issue since.
Widevine L3 is trivial to decrypt at this point, there are even APIs on the web to decrypt it. Playready SL2000 is starting to get much easier to decrypt as well.
Forcing TEE based DRM (Widevine L1 and playready SL3000) would have the potential to cause too much collateral damage. They would almost certainly have to have exceptions some devices. If they intentionally break compatibility on browsers other than chrome, they would probably face antitrust issues.
So it is likely there will always either be a way to bypass or decrypt.
More than ever, people need to start using alternatives. I recommend Odysee. It has a couple issues that they’re apparently working on but it’s easily the best overall alternative.
Youtube Alternatives are only going to start taking off is that alternative is willing to pay content creators enough for them at least a liveable wage. And it needs to be stable Odysee’s payment system relies on other people and tips are unstable at the best of times. A youtube alternative has got to have a better payment system than relying on strangers to tip the creator.
Considering how minimal income on YouTube actually is, I don’t know if that’s actually the main obstacle. There’s a reason why even some big content creators have Patreon/Locals.
I’m sitting here reading this as my spouse watches the stock YouTube client with ads on a TV that also has SmartTubeNext installed. Evidently, the ads are preferable over a less refined UX when you’re less neurodivergent and don’t jolt out of your seat whenever a stupid, loud ad comes on. As much as I’d like to say DRM will kill YouTube, objectively speaking, it probably won’t. What it may do instead is kill YouTube clients with better accessibility for neurodivergent folks like SmartTubeNext.
I’ve been thinking about using Nebula. Does anyone has any experience with it?
Its got some great creators, Ive been on there a couple of years. Only downside which some might be glad to be rid of is a lack of comments, and feedback. Without any interaction you’re just watching videos; doesn’t feel like a community or conversation.
Seems a shame because there are creators who appear to value the voice of the community on a platform where their audience has no voice.
There’s a thread from five years ago where a founder Dave Wiskus said they had plans for a thread-like comments section. So it’s weird; must not align with whatever else it is they’re doing.
I’d say the same thing about dropout TV. How can we get in the comments without a comments section!?
Dropout really needs some way to interact, even if it’s just a shared fanmail address. I don’t think my view counts make it clear how much I appreciate some of their content and talent.
I tried to contact Grant O’Brien through Twitter (made an account specifically for that), but it didn’t look like he was very active at all, probably got more interesting stuff going on. But no artist is too busy to read fanmail, right?
I think they don’t want to own moderation of it. Which I get, but ultimately feel the same way you do. I’m happy I’m on there, few years as well, but do wish they had a comment section.
No comments? You might have just sold me on it.
For the comments, I use grayjay with nebula’s plug-in so there’s the polycentric comments, but there’s very little of them.
Wonderful service. Nice, educative sometimes, and entertaining videos. Mixes well with grayjay/my other subscriptions on youtube/odysee.
Been on Nebula (with curiosity stream) for 4 years. They’re great. Good price, many of my favorite YT creators are also on Nebula, and their Nebula content either drops first, or has extended cuts and no ads ever.
They definitely have less channels and stuff overall, but a much larger percentage of their content is geared towards my interests. Also, I would say their minimum quality and production values are significantly higher than YT.
Its a shame that content creators don’t truly own the content on YouTube and can simply opt out of DRM on their videos.
Also weird timing considering boycotting is a common topic right now.
This is fine. I actually encourage this. Let the market decide whether it likes this.
The issue is that hosting costs for videos are insane. There’s nowhere else to turn except for Youtube (unfortunately PeerTube is so far off being a reasonable alternative). I would love to see some more competition, but I don’t see it happening in the close future. The sad state of things is that 90% of the population won’t care if their favorite MrBeast video has DRM.
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Maybe entertainment YouTubers should get together and do what Nebula did for educational content. I’d sign up for that, if it had channels I care about onboard. If YouTub decides to hide behind a poop-filled moat, I sure won’t be swimming to get there.
Alot of YouTubers tend to be pos(s),though some I used to follow became magats. Msms have largely taken over the front page.
The sad state of things is that 90% of the population won’t care if their favorite MrBeast video has DRM.
Agreed!!
(unfortunately PeerTube is so far off being a reasonable alternative)
Why? Because of the hosting cost? Where is Youtube getting this for cheap?
I mean, I could see PeerTube being an alternative if there was better discoverability, better tools for creators to monetize their work, and there was a huge influx of people moving over to PeerTube as well as starting their own instances in order to spread out the hosting and make it less expensive for everyone involved. YouTube isn’t getting it for cheap, they’re just financed by one of the world’s largest companies and have huge amounts of revenue.
Yeah, If content creators (at least 1 in 10) ran their own instance, I think PeerTube could be a pretty good alternative and the cost would be split between instances.
Because of the hosting cost? Where is Youtube getting this for cheap?
More than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute (reference). The cost of operating this system is astronomical. Building a competing platform is entirely out of reach unless you have nation-state levels of wealth.
YouTube’s costs are effectively subsidized by Alphabet (Google). All of the restrictions being implemented are about trying to make YouTube profitable, especially by protecting the ad revenue stream.
How much of that is low effort garbage?
My guess would be 490h of those 500h
I don’t think Peertube needs to be come as bloated as Youtube is, because Youtube is…there’s people making good stuff on Youtube, among “host this video on Youtube and then embed it on our website” and “TTS robot voice reads Tumblr post over Minecraft jumping course Zoomer crack” to “most Hollywood movies, 2 minutes at a time with the bad words censored” to…whatever. The Peertube answer to a lot of that becomes “pssh, host your own video.”
A lot of the stuff that’s on Youtube just…doesn’t need to be hauled out of the slush pile to build something thriving.
99.999% +/- 0.001
Oh sure, almost all of it. But that doesn’t make things any easier to operate - it leaves you with basically 2 options:
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Manually review every submitted video - which is literally thousands of individual video files per minute - so you need a massive staff of people who are paid to sit and watch absolute trash for their entire workday and then decide what is and isn’t worth watching for other people - which is censorship - so not only are you incurring a massive operating cost but you also have to write some standard policy to handle the ethical issues of potentially suppressing free expression, and hopefully come up with some consistent guidelines you can get all of your employees to understand and follow (vs. just using their own individual personal judgement on what videos are good or not - imagine the proverbial Karen as a YouTube censor). A lot of those people are also going to end up watching some terrible shit and require long-term support for PTSD.
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Automatically evaluate every submitted video with software - again thousands of videos per minute, and you want a software system that not only recognizes offensive material (within cultural context) but also can make value judgements about whether a video is “low-effort garbage” - which is such a vague concept that if you asked ten people you would get thirty different answers. Plus you also need to build an entire secondary server farm that doesn’t help you store or stream the video content, but just watches and evaluates every uploaded video, and probably runs some kind of incredibly energy-intensive AI model to do it.
YouTube is of course implementing versions of both, and also relying on end-users to report bad content that slips through.
That’s assuming a centralized, non-federated platform like Youtube. We’re talking about Peertube and how it may have to run differently from Youtube in order to function. I think Peertube could, as an overall platform, accept less crap than Youtube kinda has to. And I think it would be done by moderating who gets to post on which instance.
Take MakerTube for example. It’s a themed instance, they are only open to uploaders who do something arty and/or crafty. You have to apply for an account there, and if you want to post space documentaries, they’ll probably suggest you go somewhere else. That right there takes a lot of burden off of MakerTube’s admins for moderation. I’m imagining a few dozen other themed instances that operate similarly, for video game related content, science communication and infotainment, music, sports, whatever.
Some stuff I’m pretty sure everyone will agree we can just…not do on Peertube:
- shorts that are just 1 or 2 minute clips from movies or TV shows almost definitely not uploaded by the copyright owner. Official Fediverse answer: This is probably illegal, GTFO.
- videos that are not intended by the uploader for public consumption. There are people who upload to Youtube and just keep videos private as a kind of cloud storage. Official Fediverse answer: Go to Best Buy and buy a hard disk you fuggin freeloader.
- Product marketing or instructional videos. Concrete example: Dbrand (Canadian company selling vinyl wraps for phones and such) hosts their “how to install a skin on an iPhone 14” videos on Youtube. Official Fediverse answer: Host that shit on your own instance.
- Automatically generated or AI brainrot slop, to include TTS robot reading Tumblr stories over some colorful video game footage: Official Fediverse answer: Host that shit on your own instance.
- Already established creators with a decade of back catalog and likely a decent set of in-house infrastructure for video storage and editing: Strongly consider hosting your own instance please, or maybe contract with several friends in your specialty and go in together on an instance.
- “Influencers” that do shit like “take a bath with 1 of every bath bomb sold by Candles N Such”: Host that shit on your own instance.
- “Muh Free Speech” Host that shit on your own instance.
- National propaganda, religious proselytizing or other scams: Go drown yourself in the toilet like the lump of shit you are.
- Just a webcam pointed at something forever: Probably just don’t do that.
At some point I think you can winnow it down to “Hey there’s a lot of good stuff on PeerTube” without allowing every shit for brains conspiracy theorist live stream in 4k until someone presses the report button.
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That’s why they been forcing more and more aggressive ads, and In order to drive up revenue more ad reach, they allow significant amount of right wing content to become more prevelant.
Youtube is already profitable. Has been for like 5 years
Source? Because they list YT earnings, but afaik, have never said “this was a profit of ### dollars”
Heresay from 5 years ago
Yea Youtube spend billions per year to host videos, plus paying all sponsors and the top content creators. I don’t think peer will match what Google supports. Also you don’t want trash like beast or sniperwolf migrating to those sites too
That’s why I encourage YouTube taking ever more extreme steps to extract their user’s worth. If they just take it far enough, there is a chance actual competition might show up.
Hosting costs are high yeah but they are much more reachable if you scope down to “host what you actually need to emit” rather than “try to be a cheap copy of youtube” - the latter is simply pre-setting yourself for failure.
Are a “creator” that focuses on music mostly, or on archiving old TV footage, or recordings of old videogames, or stick animations? You don’t need to store everything or even most of everything in 4K 120fps in your peertube, you can just do 480p with 96k VBR (or heck, even 360p with 64k VBR in some cases) and it will be fine! Let the clients who want to upscale upscale on their end. For every minute of 4K video you can host like, almost half an hour of 360p. Similarly a creator who focuses on music dumps only needs the music tracks, not a video track of any kind (just ta video thumbnail will do).
They have been attacking adblocks for the last 10 years, unless they do what twitch does, they aren’t stopping it.
The more unusable/unbearable they make YouTube, the sooner users will start looking into alternatives.
I quit twitch exclusively because of the ads
I yt-dlp’d a video off Twitch a couple of days ago with no problem - what am I missing?
What’s your ideal outcome, pray tell?
I hope for a reddit type situation, where YouTube enshits itself to a degree that using and developing alternatives becomes attractive enough to finally break its monopoly.
I think realistically the only way that happens is if we somehow figure out how to do video with massively less bandwidth, or just move to indie platforms at far lower bandwidths. Would you be happy with potato quality video if it meant no broligarch monopolist BS? I might.
but we have figured it out, peertube exists specifically to solve the bandwidth problem.
Every viewer helps upload the parts of the video they have in browser cache, so with more viewers you have more people distributing the load, and so the origin server only experiences a fraction of the increased load.
if we somehow figure out how to do video with massively less bandwidth
Start with making videos smaller! Most (about 99%) video on the internet doesn’t need to be 4K or even 1K; stuff like “head talking about product” content creators can just be 480p or even 360p without issue. That eases bandwidth issues a good lot.
I fully agree, but those sorts of videos often don’t need to exist. A few pictures and some writing would be preferred.
Oh for sure, they totally don’t need to exist (in particular the “head talking to promote product” kind). But if they are to exist anyway, it’s easier on the selfhosters if they keep them small, which means fewer arguments against setting up your own instance (or joining in to some sort of coöp instance) which helps promote Peertube and this kind of sharing in general.
That said, I would not be opposed to 144p / 3gp from the old Nokia days.
Everyone gets a chip in their brain and we’re all used as cloud storage.
In a way this enshittificication is necessary to make the replacement possible. Whatever it will be.
This kills the YouTube. Maybe not quickly, but it will be a large nail in the coffin should they double down on it.
I pay for Premium and if they actually do this I’ll stop my subscription. Web DRM is stupid and I hate that other Streaming Services already have it. Apart from being another resource sink in browsers, it’ll stop third party clients which I use and it also turns off Nvidia Shadowplay which is annoying as it doesn’t automatically turn back on once the DRM content is no longer loaded.
Google is also experimenting with my not using YouTube any more.
Funny enough they used to use their own video playback codec which had to be cracked in order for downloaders to work, so technically they’ve been doing DRM for a long long time.
I use youtube for mediocre garbage content to fill airspace. I don’t need it. I would be better off without it. Don’t push me google, because I’ll fucking jump.
I already jumped off of a number of their other services, what’s one more?
If they do this my watching 2 hours a day with YouTube Premier is over. I will not subject myself to advertising.
