I wish the media industry understood this and took action. A lot of what they call "piracy" is less about people not wanting to pay and more about the paid experience being on-par if not worse than the pirate experience.

I wholeheartedly agree. With video games, especially on Linux, it is far better to pay. On Steam, it was far easier to just pay and click Play than to pirate the gane and deal with Wine and getting the game to work. So I pay.

Gaming in particular is an area where I think most marketplaces have gotten their act together. I don’t hesitate to buy games through Steam or the Microsoft store.

Games are easy to pay for, fast to download and I know at least steam and Epic have a very reasonable refund policy (if you have less than 2 hours of playtime they will refund you without issue). I’ve used this a couple times for games that either had many technical issues on launch or I didn’t like the mechanics of the game.

The only game store that is absolutely terrible in all of this is EA/Origin who have a very buggy and slow client. I just avoid their games as a result.

> I still have Premium because ad-free is great!

Use an alternative ad-free client if you don't wanna pay for a not working download feature.

Or just support the platform/creators because it's a small amount...

1) doesn't work without an account 2) I dont give google my payment details 3) the platform does not deserve any % of my donations, it's used used because it's a monopoly 4) not every creator I watch deserves the same cut, smaller high quality creators need more -> off site donations e.g. Patreon is way better in many ways.

Who knows whether you can stop paying for it.

I did when they stopped displaying public dislike counts. Very smooth experience, did not even ask me why I was leaving. YouTube doesn't seem to care much.

When I moved to another country where Youtube Red/Premium wasnt available, when I eventually contacted Youtube support they refunded the past 6 months of the subscription.

Of course you can.

I did the same because I wanted to consume podcasts with the screen locked and not have adds. But the download speed for me is pretty good. Downloading a 2.5h podcast in 480p (which has the same audio quality as 1080p IIRC) takes less than half a minute.

Is there really not a audio only version of the podcasts your interested in. i.e. the classic rss feed of audio files.

It's such a shame what has happened to podcasts

You can download only the audio using youtube-dl.

Sure, and I can rip the audio off the DVD for Gone With The Wind, but that wouldn't make it a podcast.

Why would they not allow audio-only downloads?

This is the main reason why I use NewPipe rather than pay YouTube's ransom. Although I have a high bandwidth plan, I just don't like wasting bandwidth and disk space for video data I'm not actually looking at with my eyes. Most of the time I pop on some intellectual content and listen to it, and the video is often unnecessary. Just give me the damn audio and I'm good. YouTube seems to think this isn't a concern, and maybe it isn't if I forced it to download the 140p version of the video, but that's still a clunky solution. Or maybe the execs think that providing audio downloads lets people "steal" music.

Afaik using the 144p version would be terrible, as YouTube couples the audio bitrate to the video resolution.

Just use uBlock origin, easy way to block ads on YouTube

We are already paying Google with our data.