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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

There’s plenty they could do. They could flip a switch tomorrow and limit access to only signed-in users, and they could further enable DRM, as pretty much by now the majority of users are already on DRM-handicapped platforms. Any will-be-called "legacy" users would just get limited to 480p.

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> They could flip a switch tomorrow and limit access to only signed-in users

Huge amount of users of youtube are literally babies, they don't know how to read or write so they don't sign in.

I'm starting to also suspect the trend of YTs algorithm insisting on recommending videos you've already watched is also a decision from this huge baby user base.

Their parents will sign in when magic rectangle stops working.

YT-DLP can import cookies to bypass the signed-in user issue. It has to as many videos in the EU require credit card age verification to access.

And YT-DLP could run the extracted Widevine plugin just as Kodi can today but ultimately it can’t spoof attestation and that’s already in the works as well.

So suddenly thousands (millions?) of users are unable to view content on YouTube?

Sounds pretty bad for ad-revenue....

You need a Google account for living a normal life, or perhaps an Apple account but that's about the extent of your options. I'm sure Google can do the math on how many principalistic people are not going to watch videos with ads anymore if they have to log in for it. Most people are already logged in because they needed an account at some point anyway, so the vast majority of viewers wouldn't even notice. Kicking off adblock users won't be a financial loss either, so it's only about the group that was logged out (probably a tech savvy, privacy-aware audience) and didn't use ad blocking (tech savvy privacy people that watch ads? You can count that group on one hand)

I hate to say this because I'd be affected but that's the math I would expect them to use. The only counter argument I can think of, why they might care to keep freeloaders there, is the network effect

They already lowered bitrates for non premium members.

Proof? The news I recently saw, if you're referring to that, actually said they'd offer a higher-bitrate 1080p option for YouTube Premium, not that they'd lock the (then) current bitrate behind YouTube Premium and downgrade everyone else.

Edit: I did some searching. In addition to that, the only relevant news I could find were about Google testing locking the 4K (2160p) resolution behind the Premium doors, which they ceased doing.

I was speaking from anectodal evidence because I've been feeling my 1080p streams look worse than before the new option showed up.

But it seems I'm mistaken [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/23/23612647/youtube-1080p-pr...

They did lower the bitrate back in 2020, IIRC, because there was so much more youtube being watched all of a sudden and they didn't want ISPs to be crippled under the weight. Don't know if they reverted that change since.

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