It's planned obsolescence for media, remove the older media and people "have" to watch the new stuff: "you pay more because it's new" and "production of all this new stuff everyone is watching costs more, so we have to put the price up", etc..

Which ironically is what caused me to cancel my Netflix subscription. I initially subscribed mainly for the older movies & B movies that were abundant, but as other streaming services have started many of these have fragmented (and many of them just aren't available). About 3 months ago I cancelled Netflix (kept prime for shipping, Youtube premium for ad-free) when I realized that between the 3 services I couldn't even find The Maltese Falcon on 2 of them, and amazon wanted something ludicrous like $13 to rent it. Not exactly an unknown movie.

I had zero problems torrenting it, and no no moral qualms about it; I'm pretty sure all the actors & crew are dead by now and not recieving any more royalties, plus I have it on DVD but I hadn't ripped it to my NAS & don't have anything that can play DVD's connected to the TV.

In case you already know, feel free to ignore my comment, but with your Youtube premium subscription, you also get a subscription to Google Play Music (aka Spotify competitor from Google). I wish they advertised it better, because half the people I know irl who have a sub to either of them, don't realize that they get the other one for free.

i used three gmail addresses for one month trials of google play music before keeping it properly, and more recently answering dumb personal questions on the google rewards app has paid half of the monthly fee for it. i think the nicest thing about the youtube premium (if wanting to pay a bit extra than just google play music) is being able to have youtube play in the background on the phone.

newpipe is a foss program that does this for free

I came back here just to thank you for that. For others interested, newpipe is available on F-Droid. It has options for pop over video playback as well as background audio playback. Sure beats the always on Youtube app.

It supports the importing of subscriptions but doesn't seem to handle playlist import currently.

yeah, cheers, i found out about newpipe today. i was pleasantly surprised that it's easy to import subscriptions into it.

OT but how in the world do you get that many surveys in the Rewards app? I'm lucky to get $2-3/month...

i get in a loop of the same questions. i think it's because i am retired but also study

> youtube play in the background on the phone

There are simpler ways :)

Is that still the case for new customers? Even if so, sadly YouTube Music is replacing GPM.

https://www.androidcentral.com/google-play-music