NewPipe – Lightweight YouTube experience for Android
newpipe.net
newpipe.net
But anyway I had too many issues with newpipe anyway even the fork.
1. The computer doesn't know whether you skipped the ad, and won't feel bad when you do.
2. The computer does track whether you watch the ad segment, and that information makes it back to the advertiser. Personally, I wouldn't want to support "creators" spying on me in this way.
In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment. If you choose not to watch the video in the first place, it can only hurt their sponsorship.
I'm pretty sure the youtuber gets money from google for views even if you don't view their sponsored content section (if someone knows better please let me know) and Google makes money by collecting data on what you watch, how often, when, using what device, from what IP address, etc.
If they use ads they will block.
If they ask for payment they will pirate.
Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
If the price & convenience is right, a significant chunk (enough to offset the impact of freeloaders) will pay.
Movie piracy used to be the norm before Netflix came along, yet movies were still made.
Music piracy was the same until Spotify came along, yet there's more music than ever being produced.
The vast majority of people do not pirate, and most people who pay would probably find piracy unethical to begin with.
I would be happy to see a serious study about this. What you call piracy has been the norm for centuries and millenia for spreading culture and reinterpreting music/shows produced by other people.
In the vast majority of the world (including in the global north), the budget you have for culture is low (if any) and when you have people with a computer, copying stuff is very common. For example El Paquete in Cuba was well documented, but even growing up in France i remember so many examples of just sharing with friends (before the Internet but still).
Even for the newer generations, Youtube & Spotify started as pirate services hosting a myriad of copyrighted content. I don't know about Spotify, but i still see people watching whole movies/shows pirated on Youtube rather often when going to places with shared computers.
Sharing is the norm. Restricting sharing is delusional desire for control. Still, it's important that people making art & science make a living, although it's not just them who need to make a living in this crazy world and we'd be all better off with UBI or abolition of private property (one can dream). So you may find it interesting that HADOPI, the law that criminalized non-profit file-sharing in France actually ordered a study on piracy and media consumption back in the early 2010s, and their own study acknowledged that there was no economic loss from piracy (as people don't reduce their budget due to pirating) and the bigger pirates were also the bigger buyers.
I dare you to find a single person who "does not pirate" in any sense of the world and actively respects copyright laws. If only, someone who doesn't sing "happy birthday" song because that's actually copyright infringement. Or doesn't watch music videos on Youtube because they might be pirated. I bet that person doesn't exist, or at least that they are not the "vast majority".
If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. This was and is rarely the case. I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
Piracy doesn't always hurt creators, and often it helps them make money. The people who pirate the most, also spend the most money on the things they pirate (https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-...). Just because something is pirated that does not mean there was a loss of income for the creator. I've pirated things and enjoyed them enough that I purchased them later, and I've purchased physical copies of things and later pirated digital copies. I've also pirated things I'd never have purchased at all which means there was never any chance of any of my money going to the creator.
The vast majority of people today pirate all the time. Posting a meme that contains a copyrighted character or image, or listening to a song on youtube from anything other than an official channel, sharing a webcomic over social media, creating a GIF from a movie or TV show, streaming a video game playthrough, and downloading a youtube video to edit into a reaction video are all technically violations of copyright law. Copyright law is so draconian that what most people consider totally normal activities online are violations.
> I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
I agree that creators have a right for a chance at payment for their work. I disagree that I have no right to choose how to consume that content. Most of the restrictions on how media is intended to be consumed comes from the corporations who own the copyright and not the creators themselves.
When creators make it known that they want their content consumed in a certain way I'll take it into consideration. Musicians who ask that you only ever listen to their albums in their entirety and never listen to a single track I ignore. When Dave Chappelle asked fans to not watch Chappelle's Show I agreed and didn't.
You are misleading because i explicitly talked about the Internet and widespread file-sharing in my comment. Most people would love to pay a fair price for high-quality DRM-free content and that's why for a while Spotify and Netflix won. Now that Netflix raises prices and doesn't license all the interesting shows anymore, people are going back to piracy because they can't afford 5 10$/month subscription for every streaming service out there.
Historically in France, a "global license" was proposed instead of HADOPI. It was like those streaming services, but run as a public service to ensure artists don't get scammed by corporations. Guess who opposed that proposal? Those same corporations, who keep exploiting the artists and milking the consumers.
I've been pirating all along. I still buy a lot of stuff, eg. CDs at concerts. Make it convenient and ethical for me to pay within what i can afford and i will. In the meantime, i'll keep pirating because i can't spend more on culture than i spend on food, often for content of dubious quality.
There is a whole galaxy of content creators who make great stuff but clearly aren’t making a living directly off content.
People like making content for tons of reasons.
Pretty much yeah. Just remember back to the first few years of youtube. Nobody was making any money from that but they were still doing it out of passion/hobby.
Open source is literally proof of this. I make software in my free time simply because I enjoy it. I publish it out there in a variety of licenses with zero expectations. I got a GitHub Sponsors profile with zero sponsors and I'm not even mad about it.
Somewhat; at first, this was the case, though I'd say many of them were simply using their university's computer resources. Later on, banner ads happened and then we had sites like Tripod, where people could build their own simple website and not pay anything for it. Somehow, these sites did just fine (for a while) by hosting banner ads. These days, somehow it supposedly costs a small fortune to run a simple website even though computers are FAR more powerful than they were in 1999 and computer hardware generally costs much less.
Most authors write books without making any money for years. They write because they enjoy writing. Not because they need it to make a living. So your statement is easily invalidated by reality
How benevolent of you...
May I then suggest that all software developers also should forego their paychecks and work for free, since they love programming and should do it in their spare time while having another day job? For example in a restaurant.
There is still value to the sponser in keeping a brand fresh in your mind
The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.
From what I heard, Google’s sells ad space via an auction system. They collect information about a viewer then when said viewer watches a video/visits a website, all the ad space on the video/website goes on auction with the viewer’s characteristics attached in real time. Advertisers will look at the viewer characteristics and decide if they want to bid. The winner of the auction gets the ad spot and has their ad shown. All this is of course fully automated and over in just a few milliseconds.
What this means is, advertisers have full control over what ads you get. Ad space goes to the highest bidder. If you have money, you can spam a specific demographic to death with your ads. Google does not in anyway try to protect the quality of life of its users.
Google’s system is both amazing and disappointing at the same time. It’s an amazingly efficient way to maximize the value of ad space but disappointing in the Google doesn’t do any kind of advance user behavior modeling to see what ads the user would be most receptive to (i.e. would not frustrate the user, high probability of engagement with what’s advertised, …) instead they leave it to the “free market” (i.e. the advertisers) to figure that out.
Maybe the fix is actually to adjust and make the ad lower energy and more bland to target the subliminal more, assuming the online ad networks don't sort themselves out
There are a small set of products that seem to be everywhere for a while, occupying a minority of sponsor segments. But in most sponsor segments I see one-off products that I'll never see again on any channel.
On the rare occasions where they show something that looks really useful to me, I'd have to take a note because it's so unlikely to be a product I will encounter again.
I don't take those notes, so I've seen a lot of great-looking products that I'll never buy due to forgetting they exist by the time they would be useful to me. When I need something I tend to browse for what's available and/or look at reviews with a skeptical eye, as I'm sure many people do.
So the sponsor segments aren't that effective for me. But I wouldn't call them repetitive, except for a few products that come up a lot.
I think it's one of those things like shoes... Nobody thinks they need shoes till they try them, and then they tend to wear them all the time.
Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).
The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.
I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.
Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.
1- Makes good, useful content that I watch often. 2- Doesn't abuse sponsorship sections. Sponsor segment at the beginning of a video? Auto-skip. Half the video is about the sponsor? Auto-skip. Constantly gets sponsorship from spam/fraudy/irrelevant companies? Auto-skip.
For all the channels that doesn't fall into these categories: tough luck.
It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
It's a small data point about the content, so it can sometimes be helpful if I'm trying to decide who to pick amongst forty different 2hr lectures on the same thing.
Because we don't want to be advertised to. There is no need for any further justification.
> I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Let them die.
Also, if you are fine with sponsor spots, you probably would have to also be okay with watching ads, so no adblocking either then.
There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.
One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.
I don't care to sit through sponsor reads, nothing more to it than that. When I'm viewing on a client that doesn't support sponsorblock, I'll manually seek to the end of the segment. Supporting the creator is great; I pay for YouTube Premium, though thanks to uBlock Origin I wouldn't see the add if even if I stopped paying. To a couple creators, I send a regular donation. If I could spend another $10/mo to make up for any revenue my sponsorblock usage loses other creators, I'd do that, but I'm less enthusiastic about regularly listening to sales pitches for the same products over and over again.
Also: I'm not sure how common it is for YouTube sponsorship contracts to have payment contingent on the view count for the section of the video with the sponsored segment, and I'm not sure if the way sponsorblock skips such segments is visible to YouTube's analytics. With at least some of the most prolific sponsors of creators I watch (Audible, Brilliant, etc) the payout is based on how many viewers sign up for a trial through the affiliate link. And YouTube has no incentive to make it easy for creators to share their detailed analytics with third-party sponsors, since independent sponsorships cut YouTube out of the deal. YouTube would prefer creators replace their independent sponsor reads with mid-roll ads.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
Sometimes videos are not viewable on a specific instance, but this way you can keep all your subscriptions and other settings even when switching to a different instance.
If I understand what you are saying, Piped has this. For example I can stream from instance-1.com but at the same time I'm logged into instance-2.com so that I can keep my favourites and settings. See "Instance" section here https://piped.video/preferences particularly the option "Use a different instance for authentication"
Also, I would not call it "adblock". It just comes without ads out of the box, just like most comparable apps.
But I moved to libretube now. Newpipe kept throwing up errors when I jumped around a video.
I actually agree with newpipe to some degree. There is very bad sponsorship, and there is light mentions of sponsorship or sponsorship adjacent content. not everything is black or white. Sponsorblock makes it all or nothing (they have different categories but I often disagree with what they put into the categories).
I wish I could turn it on per channel. because some channels I hate the 2 minute long brilliant ads, but on other channels Im fine with a 5 second "we're building this thing using X company parts because X company is sponsoring the video"
I still use it, but i find it just as frustrating as it is helpful sometimes.
My issue is less with the tool and more with the user contributions. But until there are alternative sources for sponsorblock that fit my preferences, it seems like the options are "don't use it at all" or "use it and be frustrated from time to time". I don't really care who is at fault, I'm not trying to point fingers, I'm just saying that I understand where NewPipe is coming from. Not everyone has to agree on whether all sponsor spots are good or bad.
I've done it a few times too, and if ever the recent submission wasn't good they can lock the video from further submissions
Some of it is per channel settings (some channels have way too long of sponsor segments), and some of it is just disagreement about how granular to be (on LTT they cut out the entire segue to the sponsor, and not just the sponsor spot, i dont want the LTT sponsors, but not being serious is their whole thing, I don't mind watching the segues)
That's such a simple and genius idea
The main one I was thinking of was Senpai Gaming. He does reviews of microphones and streamer equipment. He just released a video of the new Shure SM7dB mic where he does the sponsor read on the new mic.
Recently, he reviewed the new Elgato teleprompter. During which he read the ad read from the teleprompter as a means of demonstrating how the eyecontact looks/feels while reading text from the prompter. It feels like a legit test for a teleprompter to be able to demo it as such. The problem is. He says that he is going to demo 4 things about the prompter and the first one is simply reading text. And then he starts to say "And we're going to do that by sharing the sponsor of today's video"... But it sponsorblock cuts it as "And we're going to" and then it cuts to point 2. Had sponsorblock cut that after he said "sponsor" I would have at least known what was going on, but a random mid sentence cut... I feel like the Sponsorblock contributors self select to be the most rabid anti-sponsor people out there. Sponsorships are pure evil and we shouldn't have to even hear words next to the sponsorship. I understand why NewPipe disagrees and wants to differentiate between good and bad and not just "everything bad".
It's not perfect but I want to have the choice.
And I'm pretty sure that the type of person who would spend time submitting the timestamps is probably a person who also is aggressively anti-ads/sponsorships, so is probably aggressive in their timestamps, which is fine, but it makes me gravitate towards agreeing with NewPipe on "not everything is pure evil" more than the sponsorblock submitters.
What did you actually miss? Is your life worse for it?
The other limit: all things must be consumed exactly as delivered, and we must consume everything we can. (I'll disregard selection / filtering algorithm.)
The healthy medium is to consume, analyze, and synthesize how it makes sense for your particular style of traversing the information topology. Climb the gradients you want. Go as deep or as shallow as makes sense to you.
If you can derive value from skipping video played at double speed, good. If you want to or need to watch the whole thing twice, also good. You do what you need to do. No one prescription fits the bill for all people and all circumstances.
I just fast-forward or the the sponsorship segments out if they are too annoying.
I prefer using it without auto-skip though.
What do they mean? They dont even want to provide it as an option?
Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.
This is a live stream I just watched to check that it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8
It's a water pool in the Namib desert, so safe for work
There were times in the past where this was not the case, but it was likely 0.24 or before.
Obtainum downloads APKs directly from the repository's releases page, for example the GitHub releases page.
Why not use F-Droid? "Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards."[2]
[1]: https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium#readme [2]: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/#f-droid
PrivacyGuides' motivations here are really aimed for a specific type of user (and I'll note that it's slightly odd for them to place so much faith in a point of origin that's historically been the easiest to compromise: the upstream developer usually is the easiest target, particularly on otherwise dormant software); the tradeoff F-Droid does might be more worthwhile for most people in that they act more like a linux distro maintainer, so there's a second set of eyes to prevent any shenanigans from being afoot on the upstream.
You can as I understand it run their actual servers rather easily (provided you have the computer space to do so)[1], so solving that is pretty easy, should you feel inclined to do so.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
[1]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata contains all the files used to generate their servers, should just be able to combine it with their guide on how to run a buildserver on https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Build_Server_Setup/
Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.
1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.
3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.
This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.
I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.
I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.
Arent these goals one and the same?
Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.
Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.
Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.
That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.
https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...
Should YT run ads on non-monetized content? It's a fair question, and I can see a justifications either way.
[1]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
What might be useful is some way to use PeerTube distribution on any .mp4 file. Peertube is only a caching system, not a replicated hosting system like BitTorrent. You have to host one copy of the file somewhere. You should be able to put that master copy on any low-end web server, generate a Peertube URL for it, and let Peertube spool it out. Peertube works by mooching bandwidth off the people watching, so as viewership goes up, so do serving resources.
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
> Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be solved by developing free software for servers. For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs liberate the server operator, but not the server's users.
It is not open for me to port, repair, improve, or redistribute to signed and reproducible built distribution channels like f-droid, arch, or debain as I see fit. Honestly really disappointing from a team known for promoting right to repair. I was totally on board with sharing grayjay from the rooftops until I saw the LICENSE file and my heart sank.
Also at a minimum this creates a lack of accountability to prove given binaries came exactly from published code. Someone backdoors the grayjay CI/CD server and everyone gets a backdoored app. Centralized software distribution is irresponsible in a world where supply chain attacks are common.
If they just care about malicious impersonation they should have just done what Mozilla did and file trademarks but leave the code open.
It runs directly on android tv. The app even says that there is no support for phones or tablets so casting isn't going to work.
I also agree that casting is the major missing feature from all these apps. Mirroring might be a substitute for some but, again to be clear, it isn't the same as casting and in most cases the quality is going to suffer significantly.
Sure, if you have the video link in your phone, you might need to get it to the TV/Chromecast somehow, but I think that is usually manageable.
> You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.
This means that losing your Google account does not mean losing your playlist.
Big tech accounts can be surprisingly fragile.
Sent to your gmail account? :D
One of my most used F-Droid apps.
Shorts actually makes me want to ban YT in my house altogether and cancel my premium sub
It's technically a personal video-watching app, not a Youtube app, which you're supposed to link with your own personal video server, but the server APIs it is compatible with are the same APIs that are exposed by Invidious and Newpipe instances. This is not a coincidence.
I'm sure Apple is going to delist it from the App Store at some point (App Store guidelines are just that, guidelines, and there's no getting around them with a weird loophole like you can do with actual laws), but it works for now.
Hence F-Droid, which cannot exist on iOS.
There are three aspects that people often conflate, the ability to install apps from outside Apple's App Store, the ability to install apps that Apple hasn't notarized, and the ability for developers to skip paying a percentage of app sales to Apple.
We might get all three of these, but we might also get just one or two. I can imagine a world where you'll be free to install a .ipa from any website and pay for in-app purchases with your credit card, but where the .ipa will have to go through App Review and the developer will be audited to ensure that the necessary fees go to Apple.
Another use case is downloading music I like. I used YouTube for music discovery an ingestion. Now after I find something good I go to NewPipe and dowlnoad it as local audio file and enjoy it like it's good old times of napster and mp3-s.
I haven't tried NewPipe, but you can easily download audio streams on YouTube using yt-dlp. It even lets you see all the available stream options and pick the one you want, so if you prefer opus or aac, you can select that.
The platform support is implemented inside "plugins" and they are under AGPL-3.0, so… can you even distribute the application, considering that the licence of the application and plugins seem to be incompatible at my non-lawyer first glance?
Their excuse for their application licence so that they can legally prevent people from uploading ad-infested versions in Google Play and similar platforms under their name… but that's why MPL 2.0 and Apache 2.0 have trademark exclusion clauses.
Well done NewPipe, you're showing how web applications should be done.
There is SmartTubeNext with ad/sponsor block and most importantly it let's you remove shorts, news, games, music, transmissions. And it is open source.
E.g. Minecraft, mrbeast, etc
I want my kids to watch something other than their hundredth Minecraft walkthrough, screaming YouTuber video..
I want them to explore on their own, including online content.
I just want the topics for videos to be more diverse.
Which makes me worried about yt-dlp as well -- sometimes I download educational videos and other useful content I'm worried might get deleted, and with the crackdown on adblockers, I'm worried the ability to download videos will just completely cease to exist.
Maybe it's not used as much as adblockers yet.
I've seen enough stuff on the web (not just YouTube) deleted that now, I try to always download and archive anything I think I might want to look at again in the future. You just never know when it's going to disappear. These services cannot be trusted to retain anything for the future.
>with the crackdown on adblockers, I'm worried the ability to download videos will just completely cease to exist.
I really don't see how this is possible, technically. As long as they're sending data to people to view on their own computers, it's just not possible to prevent copying that data. The only thing they can do is make it more difficult, but unless they change to requiring people to use a proprietary application to view that data, there's only so much they can do while making stuff that can be viewed in a web browser. Companies have been trying to come up with copy-protection schemes for decades and still haven't succeeded; the only times they've arguably done so is when they completely controlled the whole platform (and even then, eventually people cracked it if it was popular enough).
I think it's always just going to be an arms race between the content purveyors and the crackers, so there will only be short periods where copying will be impossible, until the crackers figure out the new scheme. What's much more important, IMO, is the issue of content simply being deleted or otherwise inaccessible. We see this all the time now.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23868428/iphone-13-mini-l...
Android has so many rough edges, and the Pixel hardware is still a few years behind the iPhone. I switched back.
I miss syncthing and being able to install the apps that I want, but my phone is too important a device for rough edges.
Why did you feel the urge to push unsolicited advice? I honestly don’t get it.
(2022)
Some previous discussion last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449570
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...
One thing to note is that the Google export for Youtube is completely broken and I've been manually importing subscriptions.
- It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.
- I'm sure the folks at google figured out that watching a video is already a sign of the content being interesting. When using the official (web) player, it clearly uses this to generate recommendations (to many people's frustration)
- You can always share videos with friends or on Mastodon etc. where appropriate, that draws more eyeballs than a passive thumbs up button anyway and thus helps the creator more
The math doesn't work like that—if you can't Like any videos, then all of the videos you watch have an infinitesimally smaller Liked ratio and count than they would if you could. Any given video isn't competing with all the other videos you watch, it's competing with all the other videos anywhere on the site.
I’m sure they’d rather you watch the ads or pay for premium.
Absolutely every time I'll start with a song, and 3 next videos after, I'll be facing a 10 hour long version of the same fkng song, if not a loop of the same 2 or 3 videos.
It does provide this app to patch other apps: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager
Overall I'm glad both of them exist(ed), and they both had different strengths and weaknesses.
Like a RSS with a channel list containing channels like Jeff Geerling, Code to the Moon, Jon Gjengset, Everyday Astronaut and the like?
I wish vlc had this feature too!
Also wish downloaded videos could be played offline by newpipe.
GrayJay is a new contender on the block that might be worth looking at too.
But noone wants to pay.
There is A LOT o f creators supported by pure money donations from individual creators, or mostly by those. A lot of them support themselves by selling merch. Which is nothing new, as nowadays a lot of small/medium size bands live of selling merch.
When a major Polish radio, legendary 3rd national radio channel, went to shit after several decades (fired important staff and dummed down offer) people literally crowdfunded a full successor, with same famous presenters and so on. When that one started to push weird agenda to much and diverged from original goals... There was another one crowdfunded, pulled a lot of other major famous personell, and runs as a huge project successfully from Patreon donations.
These examples are not even unique.
There's a real parallel between the two. Streaming killed piracy for a while because the service was easy and convenient, with everything in one place. Then, streaming added more and more ads all while it became more fragmented. Now if you pay for a service, you will still see ads, and you have an increasingly limited catalog (even on Youtube, as creators move extra content on Nebula or Patreon)
The more Youtube squeezes and pushes ads, the more demand there will be for adblockers.
I guess that only abundance of devices without DRM is stopping this scenario.
Widevine already exists and is increasingly difficult to crack, especially the key levels required for 4k content.
> encoded ads
Only a matter of time before hardware encoders can do this on the fly
That's not the endgame -- Digg:Reddit::YouTube:Vimeo is the end game, IMHO.
For mid-stream ads, that doesn't work. You could pre-fetch the ad and surrounding video early, so that you can watch buffered content while the server thinks an ad is playing.
Maybe the issue is that people got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality videos for absolutely free?
YouTube pops up everywhere, on every system I use. Sometimes I'm sitting down to watch something longer, even a movie, but often it's just links from friends or coworkers, or from news articles on Reddit or Hacker News. Sometimes it's lessons, sometimes it's breaking news, sometimes it's 5-second meme videos. I use it at work and at home. I might be on my wife's iPad, or my work phone, or some library computer.
I'm not viewing all those videos on my personal devices logged in using my own personal account. I don't feel comfortable logging in with my personal account everywhere.
And there's something especially annoying about constantly seeing ads on a service I'm paying for.
On top of that, logging in everywhere lets Google track everything I view--every random Reddit click--and Google's the single biggest data collector & exploiter I know. I'm paying them to let them track me.
All told, paying for YouTube feels kinda icky in a way that paying for Netflix does not. I do pay for YouTube Premium, but I still prefer to watch videos without logging in, (ed:) with an adblocker.
Around two years ago I wanted to watch Squid Game on my MacBook Pro + external 4k monitor, and iirc still couldn’t get it working in 4k after various yak shaving. Perhaps it’s now supported, but it felt pretty ridiculous to me that I can’t even access the full service I’m paying for.
I’d prefer to pay like $5. I don’t need YouTube music.
https://9to5google.com/2023/09/26/youtube-premium-lite-shut-...
I mind paying to get the privilege my data exploited.
I mind paying to a company that use its infinite bags of money to outspend any competition unfairly.
I mind paying after getting blackmailed to accept a new deal when they made sure they left no other choice in the market.
I mind paying for a service that is optimized for "engagement" instead of my own well-being.
I mind paying to a company that doesn't know the time to stop growing and wants to crawl into every aspect of my life.
And I mind that paying forces me to give my credit card to a companies that have proven to work against me.
I mind that google will take over my entire phone if I connect to any service with a google account because I paid for it and not just login to that single service.
I mind that it will collect all that data if I don't have an adblocker anyway, just not show me ad, and then give it to gov entities (see PRISM).
What I don't mind is paying. I pay for spotify, for neflix, for dynalist, for kagi, for chatgpt, for codepilot, for github...
But I do mind that many people like you on HN accuses us of being dishonest.
> I mind paying to a company that doesn't know the time to stop growing and wants to crawl into every aspect of my life.
It's worth recognising that as an ad-supported service, YouTube has an incentive to maximise the watch-time of its users and that this incentive goes away when a user starts paying monthly. But until they begin to earn more from subscriptions than ads I can't see how this changes. Maybe there's a universe in which the adblock crackdown actually accelerates the decline in ad-viewership and YouTube becomes incentivised to stop cramming cheap ad-friendly content down our throats and becomes a platform for actual high-quality content. For now, it's probably better to support platforms that actually already work on this model such as Nebula.
I do pay for Patreon and Nebula. But Google will never get a cent from me.
They want to choke that? May as well tell the wind to stop blowing.
I spend a lot of money at Bandcamp because in exchange I get bits that I do what I want with. For some reason that's not as popular for video, but it would solve this issue pretty well.
What I don't see, is me paying for the worse service.
Youtube Premium is 12.99€ a month for me. For that small price I get to create a Google Account, accept their TOS, let them track and profile me, keep logging in everywhere (because I delete all local storage in the browser routinely) and replace the small and efficient NewPipe with the Youtube app. Futhermore I cannot download a video now and play it next month without connecting to the internet, or move it to my small dedicated video player that doesn't even have connection to the internet.
What is Googles CPM (revenue per 1000 clicks)? I don't think it comes down to more the a low cent amount. I do not watch enough video to justify the price of premium and I will never watch ads, because those are psychological warfare and completely underregulated...
If Google and all the others make a nice micro payment platform for the browser, which work anonymously and without much hassle, I will by all means pay them the amount of money which me watching the ads would have generated plus 10% service fee since they build the platform.
But not like this!
* Yes, it does cost them money to serve and store videos, and no that doesn't disappear with scale. YouTube ingests hundreds of thousands of hours of video a day, and chances are every single video is on at least 2 continents at any given time. They don't get some insane volume price on the enterprise HDDs they use.
https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
Even if you don't think you have to follow them, they can still ban you for not following their terms, or not agreeing to them. They are not under an obligation to serve you video unauthenticated and/or without receiving what they expect to receive in return (agreeing to their terms and thus paying via ads or money).
Regarding morals I don't don't care. Not worth a discussion :)
There is nothing there forcing me to watch the ads, or that forces the user agent (aka the browser) to behave in the way that server running the application wishes to.
Any other platform not only needs to offer cheap/free video hosting, but also send tons of users content similar to their interests in a way that enables new and up-and-coming creators to grow, and it needs to provide a way to pay out those creators, or there's a negative incentive to send any viewers to the other platform that strictly makes them no money.
Or the videos aren't that high quality, and are just barely at the level of value where people feel like the time spent watching (or leaving it on as background noise) was worth it, but not at the level of value where time spent+ads or money are worth it.
Like I've watched a LTT video before. I suppose I was very bored. Would I ever pay to watch it? No. Do I even think it was worth the time I spent watching? Probably not. It's like listening to some stranger at the pub tell a story. You might listen if it's interesting, but you probably wouldn't pay them for it.
There's tons of low quality, low effort stuff on there like vlogs, clean/cook/shop with me, hauls, etc. It's a hobby for the creator. People don't want to pay for it because it's not worth anything.
I'm sure there will be lovely things this community has to say about that demographic.
How about we compare with something actually worth comparing for? For example switching channels when there's the ad break, or turning the sound off, etc.
When I download something, I'm not "stealing it". When I block an ad, I'm not stealing either. I didn't remove 10$ from Google's bank account that was there before.
That said, I appreciate it when content creators provide alternative ways to support them. I support dozens of creators with monthly donations and I occasionally buy merchandise when they're selling something I'm interested in. Just don't waste my time with ads.
Content available freely online is much different, as there is no price and at best the hope is that the consumer sees an ad or sponsorship and that the content creator has accurate analytics as to how many saw the ads.
Your analogy would be more akin to someone stealing access to paywalled content somehow. In that case a price was put on the content and someone took if anyway, much like shoplifting.
The price is ads or paying for a paid service like YouTube premium.
So you're still stealing, you just convince yourself it's ok, and that's fine.
My only point there was that shoplifting and ad blocking are very different things. Stores don't make their products freely available to anyone willing to walk past enough ads along the way.
Are you stealing?
The aircon have a cost. Cold fresh air cost electricity that costs money.
The price is to buy stuff from the shopping centre, that gives money to the stores that pay a rent price for the local that pays for the aircon bill.
This is precisely why we cannot compare copying to stealing.
YouTube wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't "free".
I do pay for my internet connection and bandwidth. But obviously I found the best possible deal.
There is the busking model and I do choose to contribute a small amount to a small number of creators that I can tell put a lot of cash and effort into their uploads. But YouTube premium would cost more than all of those and I'd be paying into a monopoly, paying for MrBeast and other worthless crap and no longer paying the aforementioned creators.
People forget Gopher was around before WWW and wanted to charge for commercial entities. If they'd not done that then the outcome of the internet would have been different (imho)
https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-so...
We need to cut middlemen out of the problem. 'creators' and 'influencers' and shit should find ways to make money from their fans directly.
Patreon, Flattr, gittip, etc are ways to achieve this.
Companies have no more right to communication than the rest of us, and they don't deserve any social or legal protection for the time and attention they waste in society daily from their incessant marketing.
If you walk past a busker on the street without dropping a coin in the hat, are you "stealing from creators"?
In the former hypothetical, this is clearly absurd. You didn't ask for the concert, you didn't even attend, so of course you were not obliged to pay for it.
This would be like Netflix telling you you are "stealing from creators" by not watching their shows.
In the latter hypothetical, you did not ask for the performance but you heard it nonetheless. You may have even enjoyed it. The busker has costs that you did not meet like food, clothes and equipment costs. How could you not support that?
If Netflix follows the "private concert" model, YouTube very clearly follows the busker model. If it wasn't in public, most of these creators would be like me playing the concert in my home: nobody would attend. They need to be in public.
You can't be in public and force the public to pay.
Are you guys sure you understand business and economics? So much entitlement among corporations. The money doesn't belong to them.
Bit of context: grew up in Sudan, with embargo and us sanction (also Cuba and Iran and lately Syria), there was not even a possibility to pay for these subscriptions, torrent and modded apps were the viable options (also economical factors).
Another benefits to that: while I was in Sudan, I didn't even have to use so many ad blocks, major ads providers (Google and fb) blocked Sudan and that was absolutely great!
I don't mind paying to services, but it should definitely factor in economical status per each country
When I can pay creators directly with anonymous microtransactions, I will.
Also, let's start a competing service. How to pay for... Bandwidth alone? Forget about talented engineers or anything else.
Maybe it's a strong word but choking the revenue stream but still getting the fruits of it - there's another word for it.
One way to choke the revenue stream would be not to watch at all.
I don't pay for YouTube but it's the most useful web property. Arguably alongside Wikipedia.
Once you remove ads and the ability to track and target people, peer to peer works. Add anonymous microtransactions to creators and you end up with LBRY.
LBRY has the right idea with microtransactions.
My (at the time) 2 year old daughter actually cried the first time she saw an ad on the YouTube app.
The first are ones not related to making money in any way, someone doing their thing "for fun" or similar.
The second are ones where it might be someone's "day job" but the money isn't coming in through youtube ads. For example, a band putting their songs online for essentially free because money comes from fans going to concerts, buying CDs, or merchandise. Having the videos available essentially for free means that more people can discover the music and maybe become paying fans. Or a cook who's brought out their own book showing some of the recipes online hoping that people will buy the book. Or a martial arts school putting videos of some training or contests online hoping among other things that people will join up for real.
The third are the "content creator" ones where the author's whole business is the videos themselves and the ads are their primary revenue stream. It's not that there aren't some really good offerings in this space - there are - but if the choice is Youtube with the full ads/tracking/targeting soup or not at all, my life will carry on without this category.
It's not shocking, it's not surprising, it's pretty rational to do that if you think about it for 2 seconds. This is a solved topic, I really don't understand why people keep bringing this up.
If you are mad about people skipping your boring sponsorship segments — paywall your stuff already or stop complaining. Or better yet, find non-intrusive ways to monetize your content instead of relying on same old methods that became unsustainable years ago.
Ads do nothing but waste the viewer's time and piss them off. Sponsorships are fine, but what moral or ethical right does ANY business have to force any terms on visitors?
Sure, use whatever technical means you want to control your site, but it's not a moral failing of others that a business can't put together a healthy and mutually beneficial business model.
It turns out modern tech businesses are just shit. I wouldn't buy basically anything on offer in this market due to the total obliteration of trust in the market.
You literally cannot trust a Western or US tech company to not try dragging a net over everything you do to gleam some psych data to manipulate.
The best way to get my money is offering a solid product to me that you cannot take away after the fact with cheap parlor tricks like DRM.