But YouTube provides very little content of their own. They are primarily a hosting platform used by third-party content providers.
If YouTube doesn't want to make content accessible for free anymore, it would undermine the use case of the vast majority of people who use it to distribute their own content.
I don't know what their finances and operations look like internally, but I suspect that the revenue they are bringing is enough for them to operate very much in the black, despite some proportion of their audience blocking ads, just as traditional broadcast TV networks have been profitable for decades without having nay mechanism to ensure that viewers are watching commercials.
Perhaps YouTube should just accept that ad blocking is part of the market landscape they operate it, and plan their monetization around reasonable estimates of the actual reach of their ads with blocking taken into account. Potentially undermining their core business model just to increase ad viewership by a few percentage points doesn't seem like a sound strategy.
If you believe in the philosophy of free software to the letter YouTube can't do as you suggest. If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others. That undermines their entire business model.
Torrenting is the only real solution that comes to my mind, but that only works for the most in demand media. If you want the long tail, then as I see it, YouTube's (or similarly Facebook's) infrastructure offers the only viable solution, and there's no alternative to paying them for maintaining this infrastructure, either via ads, or via a subscription.
I also want to be able to feed, shelter, and educate the whole world without having to worry about costs, but I have no options.
https://giphy.com/gifs/arispool-communism-ferengi-ferengigan...
I agree that 'free as in beer' is not required for a 'foss device', but I don't see how you can have content which is not 'free as in freedom' on a foss device. Without DRM and licensing restrictions, how can YouTube prevent premium users sharing that content with non-paying individuals?
To be clear I am not saying it is right or wrong, just a statement of facts. All I am suggesting is that both business models (ad supported free (beer) content or paid subscriptions) do not respect free software principles. Either way, you are restricting what a user can do with that content.
The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will.
> The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will.
Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals? Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time.
Again, and I want to stress this, I'm not saying it's 'right' or defending YouTube's business practices. I just don't see how either business model can be reconcilled with the Free Software principles.
And I've never seen a video streaming site that just gave you links to download the videos. They all have some degree of security, but no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry.
> Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals?
No, I'm suggesting that not everyone would steal it, in te same way that not everyone shoplifts now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the convenience of Netflix over torrents is so great for the average person, that they'd keep paying even if there was no DRM on Netflix, because
> Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time.
What security measures can YouTube employ which are compatible with FOSS? How can they prevent users copying the content if the content is DRM free and has an open license?
> no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry.
Again, I don't follow this analogy. The overwhelming majority of people are quite happy consuming content with DRM and heavily restricted license agreements, it adds no friction to their experience.
DRM and license restrictions only matter when you want to break their terms, which is analogous to the point in a shop when someone tries to steal something. It's only at that point does the DRM feel restrictive, in the same way that you would expect your hands to be tied behind your back in a shop if you steal something.
> No, I'm suggesting that not everyone would steal it, in te same way that not everyone shoplifts now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the convenience of Netflix over torrents is so great for the average person, that they'd keep paying even if there was no DRM on Netflix, because
I did not suggest everyone would 'steal it' (whatever stealing means with open licensing) but enough would for it to significantly materially impact their business. As it stands, licensing and DRM protections mean that none of the big players will touch hosting another's content, YouTube's legal team would be would be all over them like a ton of bricks. If they removed the restrictions though, why not give it a go? Twitch could host say the top 10% of gaming content off YouTube and earn ad revenue off it, or include it as part of Twitch Prime ad free.
It's really interesting you bring up netflix because it probably demonstrates this problem more clearly. If netflix removed their license restrictions, that means a big player could host their content and pretty much only pay the bandwidth costs. I appreciate that's no small feet, but it's certainly easier than making the content in the first place and paying the bandwidth fees. YouTube is certainly at the scale that they could trivially host all of Netflix's content and their business would be gone overnight.
The only reason people keep paying for netflix is because piracy has friction. That friction only exists because of the restrictive licensing and DRM.
For what it's worth, I have been to some unattended small shops (particularly in smaller places around Europe) that are fully trust-based, with just self-service credit card checkout or a money box that you should put the right amount in, and it seems to work. I don't know if it would work for a large supermarket, but I think we are getting there, with the proliferation of self-service, and camera-based technological solutions like Amazon's.
As long as increased levels of theft doesn't exceed the salary they would otherwise have to pay, it's a good deal for the store owners.
I agree with the other child comment to you that such systems only work in a highly trustworthy society.
That's not true, as content is not software.
They also lost before commerical skipping existed, in the 80s, when they tried, and again failed to get VHS recording of live TV banned, because you could fast forward through the commercials.
Before that, there were attempts to make it illegal to record songs off of the radio, going back to the 70s!
So many attempts were made at this, that many countries have legislation which makes recording off of TV, for personal use, specifically legal.
Democracy has spoken.
In other words, youtube's model of injecting commecial content into freely viewable media, and hoping people won't modify it to their tastes, is a proven failed business model.
Any executive which thinks this is the path, and they one can legally enforce it, is literally delusional and unfit to ply their trade.
All their hand-wavy attempts to get around this, via encryption, via copyright have also failed repeatedly.
This business model is still alive, but control of endpoint is dead, dead, dead.
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Amazon+Echo+Dot+3rd+Gen+Disasse...
Except in this case, where it’s a proven successful business model.
Universal Studios sued Sony over BetaMax not because it was worried about skipping commercials, it wanted to be able to sell movies instead of people being able to record it.
The first lawsuit about programmatically being able to skip commercials which is more akin to the crowdsourced YouTube skipping creator embedded sponsorship was in 2001 when 28 studios sued ReplayTV out of existence.
https://www.eff.org/cases/newmark-v-turner
Also see: no cable tv was never ad free except for premium channels like HBO.
In spirit, you're right. But legally, the DMCA was specifically intended to give the media companies what they had always wanted but been denied by the courts.
YouTube could monetize their content with YouTube Premium without taking the control away from the users, by means of not letting anyone view the content without paying. But they do not want to do that, as providing content for free is what made YouTube popular in the first place. So they lock down the users' machines.
The only way to provide content for free, yet force users to watch advertising, is to lock down users' computers and remove their freedom to control their own computing. That's what most HN users are against, as it goes against the philosophy of free software [0].
If YouTube doesn't want to provide free content, they have all the liberty in the world to remove free content from their site and provide it only for YouTube Premium users. But they don't want to do that, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html