>> The removal of in-video ads. > You can pay YouTube for ad-free viewing... not doing so and stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"

I don’t understand this sentiment AT ALL. Google has built an entire business out of scraping and selling other peoples content. YouTube has become the defacto host of virtually ALL VIDEO. So yeah, I would watch a video without ads.

This is the internet. If they send the ad and the video and I use a program to hide the ad but watch the video thats my choice. Its MY computer. If they want to take steps to stop this thats up to them.

Advertising is disgusting honestly and your statement in my opinion is an ice cold take

Some people work their ass to make a living and even if ads are annoying, for a lot it is what's keep them moving forward.

Maybe Google makes money by selling other people content but they provide all the infrastructure to allow content creators to have their business first.

Bypassing the ads is hurting mainly content creators, not Google...

> Bypassing the ads is hurting mainly content creators, not Google...

No, it hurts Google too. Google isn’t some benevolent actor operating youtube at a loss. It’s a cash cow now.

It hurts both. If people support the YT creators they watch on Patreon or in some other way, that's fantastic. But you should support them in some way if you watch and appreciate their content.

I do it, but the point is most of the people don't, they simply watch YouTube.

I'm also a content creator myself, guess what, most of my revenues come form ads, not Patreon.

> Advertising is disgusting honestly

Again, they give you the options: subscription model or ad-based model.

This covers the cost of infrastructure, paying creators, and paying developers.

It doesn’t make sense that they or any other company will host and send you video for free at a financial loss to themselves because you’re watching it on “your computer.”

Then again, we live in a world where drugstore makeup needs to be kept behind lock and key, so this shouldn’t be surprising.

> Again, they give you the options: subscription model or ad-based model.

They offer those options, but the fact remains that there is a third option: ad-free no-subscription model.

As a user of the ad-free no-subscription model, I give them two options: internalise the costs of people taking the third option, or spend time and resources trying to make the third option technically impossible.

As a user of the ad-free no-subscription model you can’t become their customer. There is no requirement for any business to offer to sell you exactly what you want.

You can’t buy a word processor without non-English dictionaries, buy a fivepack of beer, buy half an apple, etc.

That’s no reason to then find it reasonable to take that, let alone take that for free.

Completely your choice to bypass it, I just don't agree it's ethical when there is a choice to pay a bit of money instead to not have the ads. I will agree that this does not stop them from gathering your data and that is fair. But just stripping the ads without paying when they give you that choice doesn't seem like an ethical choice.

I close my eyes during the ads. Want to lecture me about how unethical that is? I’m “stealing” from the advertiser now because google will charge them for that view.

In a way, yes, but both Google and Advertisers know that not every view is going to have a fully captive viewer. It's a spectrum, and where you think the line should be drawn between unethical and ethical behavior is a personal viewpoint.

With all the shit google has done i honestly don't care if people are ethical when dealing with them.

I don't care about Google. I'm more concerned with the creators on YouTube.

Still don't care to be honest.

> Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone?

Google decided that in YouTube for iOS the feature would be premium only, at least for now. Maybe they feel iOS users are more easily monetized. Who knows. It most certainly isn't a limitation of the platform.

> stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"

I never use YouTube intentionally. The service is a bit of the perfect example of boiling a frog, with one short skippable ad becoming multiple skippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads plus interstitial ads, on top of the content itself almost always having sleezy "sponsored by" advertising content. It's simply remarkable how what was supposedly the new world that would break us free from the classic television model has somehow gotten so much worse.

That doesn't really address your point, but it is kind of tough to feel too sympathetic. The morality becomes...clouded.

> On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem

Google decided to be extra greedy towards iOS users, so users helped solve it. Sounds like you're giving it a thumbs up.

Yeah I just want to suss out that picture in picture is indeed working just fine for iOS users as it is documented as working by Apple. Do other sites activate PiP reliably? Note that PiP on mobile has always required (stupidly so) that you be in full screen mode prior to activating it. In my own experience, making picture in picture trigger on iOS on my own video apps seems to be fleeting. Can someone on iOS check in on alternative video sites to see if PiP is triggering reliably?

I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure. Just seems like there may be problems on Safari/iOS (and the underlying WebKit framework that all or most third party iOS browsers use) more than on other platforms/browsers

> Yeah I just want to suss out that picture in picture is indeed working just fine for iOS users as it is documented as working by Apple.

It does not. I just re-tried (iPhone XR on the latest version of iOS). If I jump out of Safari I get the PiP video for about half a second and it disappears. It works great with Vinegar, as advertised. Websites that use the standard video tag work as they should as well, from what I have seen.

> I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure.

Indeed. And in the meantime I will work around them. And if they block it, I’ll just YouTube-dl stuff ahead of time. And keep laughing when Google devs whine about Safari not supporting Chrome’s HTML extension du jour.

PiP works perfectly everywhere else so I assumed this is like when Google breaks Firefox and slacks on fixing it, where it might not have started as a deliberate attempt but someone intentionally keeps fixing it off of the development schedule.

I'm something of a master thief myself; my whole life when commercial breaks started on TV, I changed the channel or turned the TV off.

Yeah and I see how this is kind of a modern analog to that, but at least in that case the consumer of the media is making a tradeoff.

Perhaps a better analogy is DVRs and their fast forwarding (or completely automatic) removal of ads. This kind of tech will always be possible and I kind of doubt YouTube will make a loud fuss about it.