They are following in the footsteps of the movie industry, which also provides worse experience to the paying customer.

Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads. (edit) Pay for DVD, get unskippable "antipiracy ads". Torrent the movie, and you'll be watching the movie in under 3 minutes of download.

That's also if they provide any experience at all. You know, "not available in your region" is what a paying non-US non-EU customer should expect to occasionally see. Worse: even if there was something in "your" library last week, you can't expect it to be there tomorrow.

If you're non-paying customer, with some services, you may get around with a VPN. If you're paying for the service - virtually everyone uses your billing address, so you're paying to have access denied.

Just had that experience with GPM recently (other services are no better)

> Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads.

In Thailand, there is (was?) a 5-minute-long (literally) memorial video dedicated to King Rama IX before every movie. Everyone in the theatre is expected to stand for the video's entirety - after the 30 minutes of ads and trailers.

I like the memorial video and don't mind standing for it at all. Altough it would be a nice touch if they put subtitles on it.

Chiming in real quick. Why the downvote HN? Let a guy have his preferences (:

I don't know for sure why the downvote, but maybe because Thailand is a place where you can be imprisoned or exiled for criticizing the (late) king. It's not hard to imagine somebody on HN might not be cool with somebody supporting that sort of enforced devotion.

Just to clarify, you can also be imprisoned for criticizing the current King, as well as any of the late Kings at all.

The user is being downvoted because he brought up an unrelated argument that contributes little to the discussion. The original complaint was being forced to stand up and pay respects to the late king. Not whether people liked/disliked the memorial.

It's akin to a debate about whether Apple was right to push copies of U2's albums onto all iTunes users [0], and someone chiming in with, "But I don't mind U2!"

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/15/u2-bono-issues...

They keep trying to make it more like TV. Seemingly oblivious to the generation using it exclusively because it's not TV.

I guess giant TV advertising budgets are sticky and they're trying to figure out how to shift them to YouTube?

Not just that--quality too. Enjoying your 4K computer screen? And you're paying for the highest-tier Netflix subscription to get 4K content? Well, unless you're using Microsoft Edge, you're capped at 720.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

Theres a chrome extension to get netflix to stream at 4k. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/super-netflix/aioe...

> Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads.

Man, you aren’t kidding. I’m a spoiled Seattleite who can walk to two IMAX theaters attached to a non-profit science center, Paul Allen’s Cinerama, and an indie theater. I had the experience of going to a big name multiplex theater in another city recently, and I just had to shake my head at how awful the experience was for how much it cost.

Almost instantly nowadays, because there are streaming torrent programs.

I wouldn't call an IMAX setup a 'subpar experience'

These days, when I have a movie ticket for time T, I plan to arrive at T+20 minutes. That's when the ads are over, roughly when the trailers are playing.

There are several "dining" theatres near me including one which only has full service prior to the films beginning, and all of them are low-occupancy theatres with online seat selection and generally very large, comfortable, sometimes rolling leather chairs.

Pick your ticket online, show up a few minutes earlier, enjoy a decent appetizer, and get a drink or two while the movie is on. Whatever floats your boat. I find it's a much better experience and frankly not that much more expensive than sitting through hell my local multiplex

That's nice, in my country we have two big movie theater companies who provide a similar service, but I hate it because they serve the food in the beginning of the movie, so there's a lot of noice and waiters coming and going.

Our local theater finally figured out the right way to do this. Only the rear half of the theater can order food at their seats. If you're in the front half, you have to get your food in the lobby and bring it in yourself.

This way, when you make your seat selection, you can choose if you want the convenience and slight distraction of waiters, or if you just want the comfy chair and no waiter.

I’ve one of these locally as well. We used to like it until we went 3 times in a row to see a specific movie and were told that the online schedule was incorrect. What a waste of time.

It doesn't work well if the ticket has no reserved seat. You do that and the only seat available will be in the first row.

Dont think thats really a thing outside of US (another thing the US is like awkwardly behind in).

Assigned seating is gaining traction pretty quickly here. The theaters with good reputations all assign seats.

Depends on the Cinema I guess. At least most cinemas I’ve worked with have configured their system to adjust show start depending on how much advertisement there is so the ads are finished ca 10-15 minutes after the scheduled time.

Well, when the movie is in theather, there are rarely good quality (non-cam) torrents available and the screen is usually bigger than at home, but it might not be a factor, depending on the viewer or the movie. But it's true when it reach DVD, you'll still have to watch the anti-piracy ads.

Interestingly Netflix et al skip the anti-piracy garbage and excluding the miserable UI actually do a good job of making "pick movie -> watch movie" as convenient as torrenting.

But still, I've torrented every DvD I own and the discs rot in the attic. I never cared about the extras anyway time to watch is ~a hundred times lower.

This might be different in the German 'market' but it rarely takes more than a few weeks to have a high quality copy of the cinema movie around.

There are at least 2 sites that have a way better selection than any video store, amazon or Netflix ever will have.

Except that some hosts force you to watch an ad (30 secs) it is literally the most comfortable way to consume anything.

If your client has a sequential downloading option and it's a healthy torrent with just the movie/show (i.e. not a split RAR file), you can effectively stream the movie/show.

Not to mention the increase of product placement in movies these days too!

Ive been paying 1-2$ for a movie on amazon or whatever. Non issue

I love the movie theater and the previews.

I liked previews more when they didn't spoil the entire movie. Movie theaters are okay for louder movies. I regret watching a quiet place in a theater. The loud audience did their best to ruin the experience.

Some theaters charge a little more and have a one-warning policy before ejecting customers for talking or using cellphones. I watched A Quiet Place in such a theater and thoroughly enjoyed the experience - the high-quality surround sound was great for a movie that relies so much on sound design.

Yep. I used to be able to play a non-music youtube video on my phone while playing music in the background.

Now it's one or the other, and I can't even get around it by playing music on another device since I use Google Play Music.

Shame Google Play Music is going away, it does some cool things. It lets me upload my own music so I can actually listen to Tool on a streaming service.[0] It lets me build up a collection of music without necessarily endorsing it with a positive rating. And of course it has most albums I go looking for.

But it's a Google product, so of course once it's made its way into your routine it gets canceled. I had hoped that the payment model would delay that a bit longer...

[0]: Tool is super pretentious and says they don't make songs, they make albums. So their music is not available on any services that would allow for buying singles, even if you could also buy the album. It's only available (last I checked) on Pandora where you're going to get nothing but singles and have no ability to listen to the full album.

It's a shame Google Play Music is a Google product. I have it and like it for the same reasons you do, but it is consistently hamstrung by clearly existing primarily to attract enough users to have a somewhat competitive service and gather usage data, not to excel in the market or outdo the competition. At the very least, it's not incentivized to improve much. They've only JUST fixed the UI issue where the 3 dots to select a song's context menu were only several pixels away from the scrollbar, so trying to queue a song could scroll you a mile away in the playlist. But there's a litany of issues that have gotten so frustrating I'm ready to switch.

-Adding a song to a playlist causes the entire playlist to refresh back to the top -The app is borderline useless without a connection - queuing songs doesn't work, modifying playlists is inconsistent at best, and the app seems to arbitrarily undownload albums - There's no ability to sort or filter a playlist. Spotify has let you search within a playlist or sort by artist for how many years, and Google can't hash out the same functionality. -Sometimes modifying playlists seems to desync them between the device and server, or something. I'll click a song, which starts for a brief second and then skips 3-5 songs down the playlist. Likewise, sometimes songs skip halfway through, sometimes they refuse to play at all...This is for me the basic functionality of a music app and GPM fails at it. These problems seem server related because they're 100x worse when casting.

At least it comes with YouTube Red. Though the existing YT Music app inexplicably does not allow you to queue videos on a chromecast. Regular youtube, I can add a dozen music videos to an editable queue. YT music, you must play each individually. Does Google have product managers?

It always kills me when people say things like this about gathering user data. I was an eng. manager on GPM for almost 5 years, and in that entire time I never participated in or even overheard anyone talk about the value of user data when it wasn't in the context of improving our music recommendations. Any benefits that other teams got from our user data were secondary at best, and we didn't really have time to think about that.

It's only my speculation as to why all these deficiencies go unaddressed. It seems to me like GPM is not in any way incentivized to offer a product significantly competitive to other music streaming apps. If they're not even using the usage data, then I've really got no guess on why the app is almost unusable on an airplane.

Thanks for your work on GPM. Don't know when you left the team, but there was a time when it was pretty even to the other offerings and it's still got its qualities. After all, I'm still paying for it.

So why does GPM suck so much then?

> Shame Google Play Music is going away

What makes you say that? From the linked blog:

> If you are a subscriber to Google Play Music, good news, you get a YouTube Music Premium membership as part of your subscription each month. And if you use Google Play Music, nothing will change -- you’ll still be able to access all of your purchased music, uploads and playlists in Google Play Music just like always.

> What makes you say that?

Years and years of experience with cloud-hosted products and anything that requires official support to continue to function.

Could you elaborate?

Google Reader, Google Wave, any of whatever chat/video/voice offerings they're planning on killing off in the next year or so. I don't even remember what they're called.

Which of those products were paid products and killed off?

Google Play Music isn't a paid product for me.

Hm, I'm not sure if Reader or Wave had a paid version.

Idk, play just seems more significant.

YouTube Red is the stupidest thing ever. It advertises as "youtube without ads", but the majority of ad content is embedded into the videos by the creators in the form of often undisclosed product placement.

That certainly exists, but that just means you need to change what you're watching. Channels like 3 Blue 1 Brown will openly disclose their ads, usually at the start or end of the video. And others simply have no content related to things you can buy and are supported via the YouTube ads in and around the video instead.

> 3 Blue 1 Brown

Their refresher series on linear algebra is seriously amazing as is other content. :)

Good point. I wonder if Google will start banning that to make YouTube Red/Premium more attractive.

If they do this, their content creators will leave for another platform.

What other platform?

A bunch left for twitch after the demonetization scandal. A few use exclusively Patreon, but there's no discoverability there.

I will agree there's not a lot of options, though.

How do you ban something like that? If I make a video in which I happen to be drinking a Mr. Pibb, how do you tell the difference between it being undisclosed product placement vs. me being thirsty?

As far as I know they do keep track of videos that have undisclosed product placement, I'm fairly sure I've read that videos that do that are getting demonetised.

I also have YouTube Premium and use it from my workstation + my work laptop + my phone, and never had this issue. Maybe this is something TV specific if you use their TV web app (cannot control playback from multiple devices at the same time) ?

Yeah, I don’t have this issue. I enjoy no ads and the ability the play videos while using other apps.

So I'm use red simultaneously on my TV (androidtv), my laptop, my phone and my tablet. All without any issues.

i i'm playing music on google play and go to watch a youtube video, i get a warning that i'm listening on another device. doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen.

Just one? At least Netflix was smart enough to give 2-4 or whatever.

I’ve yet to see that and I use YouTube like that literally every day. I wonder if you’re in a test group or specific to whatever media you’re watching.

They also have the worst Apple TV experience (unless I'm an idiot) where you can't queue anything. Their phone app plus a chromecast lets me load up a ton of videos to watch, I can't for the life of me figure out how to queue things using just the Apple TV however.

Just as an fyi, with an iPhone at least, you can get this same behavior of queuing with the apple tv youtube app + iOS youtube app. Not sure if this functionality is available with android, as the apple tv shows up as a cast option.

I disagree. My YouTube experience greatly improved with red.

No more ads. Ability to download videos for a long commute / plane ride.

You can do all of that easily without paying though, and without having the two screens issue.

Adblock or youtube-dl does not allow the video creator(s) to be paid for their content. I tried patreon to support creators I like but not all of them use it and their pricing changes awhile back turned me away. Youtube red has been a much better alternative.

Yes. But not available in the UK so I use patreon etc for few and the rest I complain to my friend at Youtube in the hope it will arrive here! Background play and offline is essential...

Not sure I've ever run into this problem but I pay to have my fiancée added to my subscription.

Does it still do that if you logout?

I don't have a YouTube account, and don't plan on creating one either.

Nope. That's the workaround. I usually just open an incognito window and watch the video I want.

Most of the time even if I pause my Google Play Music and open a new Youtube tab to watch a video I get the you can't watch two things at once notice. Very annoying.