All the videos start in potato quality for me now. What is going on? Surely they can afford the bandwidth of all services?

If you mean a low resolution, you can use any of several browser extensions (I like Iridium) to automatically "manually" select the resolution right when the page loads for every video, and this will also increase your maximum buffer from 20 seconds (?) to 2 minutes, which is nice if you're on wifi. If you mean on high resolutions the videos still look terrible, that's because the av1 versions of many videos look very bad above 720p on purpose if they're mostly watched in certain countries (can't find the source now, so treat as hearsay) where most viewers are on smartphones. You can mitigate this by going to settings > playback and performance and select "Prefer AV1 for SD."

Thanks for the tips. Will give the AV1 setting a shot. By Iridium do you mean "Iridium for Youtube"? It seems it's not maintained anymore? TBH this functionality was default working on Youtube for me until recently and suddenly stopped. I'm on a 4g based wifi at home (long story) so maybe this is the issue but it 1) only just started happening in the past 2 weeks and 2) really shouldn't be an issue as the speeds are pretty good. Everytime I switch to 1080 or higher even there is no buffering issue at all.

Most frustrating is the YouTube video quality with Chromecast. I can get some 4K to my tiny cellphone, but Chromecast projected to 190" picture on the wall is locked to some unknown SD that is compressed to smithereens making it completely unwatchable.

Are you, by chance, using Brave? I've noticed that recently with Brave as well. Didn't seem to happen in Chrome even when viewing the same videos on the same machine.

Firefox. Dark pattern to get people to use Chrome?

I've also been seeing this in Firefox for the past couple weeks or so.

The video quality will default to "Auto-1080p" or similar but it will be visibly much worse than 1080p quality. Switching to 1080p manually seems to be the only way to get good quality.

This has been the case for as far back as I can remember.

I've had the same experience on Safari—in addition to the issue with Find no longer working in Google Docs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351855).

I strongly suspect that at least part of the reason for these is to discourage people from using Google's properties with browsers other than Chrome (whether it was the reason for creating them, or just noted as a benefit for refusing to fix them once they were identified).

I suspect this is the real cause. They did it with search, makes sense they would do it with other areas as well.

They did reduce default quality for corona reasons before, might be the same thing?

It just started happening so I doubt it.

This, and increasing tendency to suggest the same kind of stuff I've already seen, aka feeding the echo chamber. Also quite a bit of stuff that I've actually _have_ seen.

>music-only video service

I'm not sure how that isn't soundcloud/spotify.

Soundcloud and Spotify don't have any video.

Spotify has video for some titles, particularly pop.

Usually its like a 30 second loop vs an actual music video.

We're rapidly approaching 30 seconds as the "standard" length for pop music.

tiktokization of pop music /s

It's actually the spotifization of pop music- spotify pays per song not per minute, so artists are incentivized to make shorter songs.

I'd argue it's actually just part of a very long trend.

Compared to classical music certainly, but between the 60s and the 90s the average song length did increase again: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/6003271/why-are-songs-3-minute...

Almost certainly in large part due to "Stairway to Heaven" and "American Pie."

:-) Depending how they used the Music Brainz data could be – there are enough longer songs around on albums at least. (Though American Pie was actually published as a double-sided single, interesting)

While this is admittedly rather handwawy, even outside of this I have the impression that there must have been some lengthening: It feels like basically every Rock & Roll song from the 50s/early 60s mostly is around the two minute mark and very rarely even approaches three minutes. Afterwards however, three or four minutes doesn't seem that unusual to encounter, never mind those really long songs, too.

That was my reasoning.

Given the glut of music streaming services, it seems unlikely to me someone could make money trying to compete with all of those and YouTube simultaneously.

I honestly believe that there's a market for people who want to watch a series of related music videos, and not have "A Vocal Coach Reacts to Silk Sonic!" pushed onto them.

YouTube itself has this. music.youtube.com

Not sure how it is implemented. It seems to just identify and catalog all of the videos uploaded to normal YouTube where the audio track consists of a single continuous musical track. It's not official music videos.

Thanks for the link. I gave it a try. Even songs which do have videos appear not to have videos on that service, oddly.

Apple TV/Music has music videos too, but it's a different kind of lock in with them.

I use medici.tv for Western classical music.