YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers
piunikaweb.com
piunikaweb.com
Lately I discovered Firefox with background play and sponsor block extensions still work. If this stops working hopefully tubular will be a good backup.
Except for on the TV (where I use SmartTube), all of my Youtube activity is done with web browsers.
Otherwise: On both big computers and with my pocket supercomputer alike, that means Firefox and uBlock Origin. It works quite well for navigating Youtube's website and watching videos.
An old iPad that I have suffers from Apple's deliberately baked-in lack of choice, but it does handle Youtube's website very well with Safari and AdBlock.
It has been a very long time since I've used Youtube's app on any device at all.
This started happening for me a few weeks ago.
You can download only the soundpart as mp4 or opus too.
Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.
It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.
I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.
Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.
If you marry somebody and they suddenly become a totally different person and try to extort you a common reaction is to feel deceived and unhappy. They have cheated you in a sense of the opportunity cost of being able to marry someone else.
That people might not understand that tells you something about them.
Anyway, in this case I think the analogy is a little overblown because the stakes are so different, but is revealing. You can way more easily divest of a software product than a marriage (presumably, tho that may differ locally). But, as in marriage, there's a interesting nuance: the stories we tell ourselves about what went wrong are so often one-sided, which lacks empathy for how the other person is probably just doing their best. A similar empahty mismatch with the entitlement of consumers who don't comprehend that the value they expect a person to provide them for free, should actually be compensated. As in, a free exchange.
That someone might confuse those could tell you 'something about them.' Or it could just be an honest mistake, on their part. That we're all likely to make.
Still the trigger to ape-brained fairness-wiring seems similar, and embodies that same one way empathy. Free and fair exchange, in commerce and relationships, should be based on more of a mutual empahty.
Thanks for bringing it up!
Arranged marriages are unpopular because we value choice. For the same reason we, westerners, abhor monopolies that transform society, wreck age old institutions, remove choice and limit access to what once was free.
Aside from that - what age old institutions are wrecked by monopolies, or which ones are you talking about it? Genuinely curious.
I see your point now about monopoly. It’s more sort of monopoly in the digital age and it’s pretty coherent what you’re saying, From the narrow point of view that you’re meaning here, and it is a significant point. I think the only solution in that case is you have to treat them as institutions and they have to be run for the public benefit - but saying that sounds ridiculous and I don’t think it could ever work so I guess our societies have to come up with some other solutions. But the problem, your point is referencing, is very real.
If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube), I would have no problems with them changing their monetization model.
Hmmm, possible. How to test? Hard, given their monopoly status. Tho does Rumble offer paid subscriptions?
A small but perhaps weak counter to your thesis is that if people were really unwilling to negotiate with YouTube over cost/experience, why would they then so vehemently attempt to eradicate ads, rather that accepting them as a lesser cost than the subscription fee?
But I guess what you're really saying is that none of the costs YT deigns to levy is felt as fair by those complaining. Not the ads. Not the USD9 (?) / mo subscription, however localized. Thus it's not free-then-paid, it's "bad pricing" that's arming the militia? Were the pricing simply "fair" people would be happy to pay it. But what rational expectation could they have for a fair price? Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive, but IMO provide less range. I'm less convinced "fair price" is it the more I think about it, but there could be something there. How else would you expand that?
Good, self contained point overall. Tho I'm going to side with the psychological factor as I've experienced that in other domains where the monopoly is not a factor. And the "merely a fair price" argument hinges on a sense of rationality which appears conspicuously absent from the reactions. Emotional and ape logic, yes, but objective and economic rationality + empathy logic? No.
I don't wanna trick anyone into showing me ad-free content, I just want a chance to choose.
Small strange nuance for me is when I switch to my corp account, and see an ad, sometimes I really enjoy the ad, because it's novel and creative. Sounds funny to say, and I probably wouldn't fele like that if I saw ads all the time. But some of the YT ads do seem pretty high quality.
Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling their prices are too high, whether the price is paid in ads or subscription fees.
When you say "their attempts to extract revenue go far beyond that"(A) I feel I can't accept that on good faith, I'd need to see numbers. Also I doubt this kind of data is the thing most people reacting with "prices are unfair" or "payment is bad", are drawing on, instinctively or not. So it's hard for me to accept this thesis as the source of ills. Tho, maybe it is. Maybe people's innate sense of fairness really does cover this, somehow.
I'm not aware of those numbers, so it doesn't seem that way to me, but maybe I'm just not across it. Can you give examples of your claim (A)?
Another way we could measure it is by the value of an ad-view relative to the price of the subscription they offer. Ad views are auctioned and go for different prices based on category, demographics of viewers, etc., and aggregate statistics are not provided, but an ad-view typically tends to be in the range of US$0.01 per ad view. A subscription fee of US$9* to avoid ads, then, would require viewing 900 ads to justify the cost. I suspect in reality most people don't see more than 100 ads in a month, so Youtube is likely generating an 8x profit margin over costs of not showing ads to Premium users, give or take depending on how you work out the napkin math. If people had an option to buy an ad-free subscription with none of the other premium features for $1/mo, I suspect the uptake would be significantly higher and feel fair to the general population.
*After looking it up, Youtube Premium apparently actually costs US$14.
Anecdotally, I used to spend, I believe, ¥480 per month for a Niconico subscription (Niconico is the Japanese domestic equivalent to Youtube). I was content paying this subscription fee for years, until they increased the price up by 50% to ¥720, and about two years ago the price further increased to ¥990. I cancelled my subscription and stopped using the website. I am not opposed to paying subscription fees to platforms, but when it feels extortionate, I won't. The same is likely true for many or most people.
Consumer laws should prevent Google doing this. We need an anti-DMCA to make circumvention, bypassing, or disabling of user’s device or OS features illegal.
It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.
Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager
Rossmann's Grayjay app offers the same functionality in a separate standalone client. It has a paid pro mode, but is free software. I use this on devices that I haven't signed in with Google.
You can buy a licence to support the app and the development, but the feature set is identical if you pay or not.
A big difference.
Browsers will “slow down” various aspects of pages when they’re not visible, like animations or timers, to save on battery usage on laptops or phones.
Even if your remove explicit APIs for backgrounding, pages can still use heuristics to detect anyway.
That is what it means to have control over your own computing.
Ah, see, there's the problem. The corpo apologists in the room don't want you to have that. The hardware you bought; err, licensed; to them, is their playground.
As an avid idle game player, I'm tired of opening games in different window and having main window not-fullscreen just for the game to play normally
This "tab unloading" is great and all, but not giving us users any control to turn it off is awful
This and ubo on android really make firefox a really great (the best imo) browser on android.
Oh, absolutely. If someone is not seeing this writing on the wall, they must be blind.
Otherwise the other option is to drag the tab out to a window of its own, they can't know it's not visible, at least that works for Twitch ads.
Tell your favourite content-creators to consider alternatives alongside youtube (like peertube), and promote the alternative platforms, until the network effect pays off.
Along the same line is that you can watch any hour long video without interruptions unless it is music where you will get interrupted every couple of minutes with "are you there?" dialogues.
This causes a fatalistic chain where the video has a captcha, and if you don't answer it in 5-15 seconds it goes to the next in the playlist and the process repeats. This turbo charges uncontrollably down the series of videos.
The solution is within seconds remove the &pp= (or go back a few pages and do so) this gives you as much time as you need to solve the captcha. Or remember to copy the search result link instead of clicking on it and clean it up.
I wrote to youtube about this bug where playlists don't wait for you to answer the captcha and never heard back from them, which is what I expected, but figured I'd try.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that they can get some money from it, but maybe there's too much money now. Every time I hear about a YouTube creator quitting their job and going pro, I fear for the future quality of their output.
As an example: knowing that I won't be able to keep the sound playing for the 5 minutes in between two buses when I need to walk and pay attention, I'll probably just launch a podcast from the beginning of my hour of transportation so that I'm not interrupted. For these five minutes, they loose me for almost an hour.
Dismantle the GAFAM. Death to them. They're evil, imperialistic, freedom-killing machines.
If you're thinking about content creators, you're just wrong. Most of them get almost nothing from YouTube ads, and for those who do, a few of them have no money have multiple revenue sources of which YouTube AdSense is very rarely the main one. Many do in-video product placements, which are not affected by being able to get audio only or having an ad blocker, and many have things like a Patreon, Tipeee, Ulule, of some sort. I pay monthly directly to the creators I watch the most on these platforms and who do not have millions of followers, because that's what they say help them the most.
Really, thinking Google worsening our user experience is even remotely something they do in favor of content creators having a hard time at the end of the month is beyond naive.
Then they better have a 'correct' client for all platforms out there because they are filthy dominant at worldwide scale.
In my personal space: I don't think they are competent enough to provide a 'correct' set of ELF64 binaries for elf/linux, you know 'wayland->x11' fallback, 'vulkan->CPU' fallback, OLD glibc ABI, etc (BTW, wayland+vulkan = android).
If you want something lighter for Firefox Android. There is also the Background Video Player extension.
Termux > install mpv > mpv "[URL]" (or mpv --no-video "[URL]")
Alternatively:
Termux > proot-distro > set up audio > play in browser like firefox
At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.
juggling the phone to not only skip ads, but also forcing the phone screen to be active, is a hazard.
In my case this loophole being closed, wouldn't make me pay for premium... but it would make a younger version of me certainly more dangerous on the road.
Multitasking is a basic OS feature, no matter what kind of device you’re using. Gating it behind a paywall is user-hostile behavior at its finest.
Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.
Vimeo? It's basically dead. DailyMotion? It could've been an alternative, but they've recently deleted most old videos. Peertube? Nice idea in theory, but lack of content.
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> Okay, so list which websites I can use to watch all kinds of content that I can find on YouTube.
it serve this purpose.
It is just an oligopoly like most other sectors.
And then I realised people primarily consume shorts.
There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.
If they don't like users using their service how they deem improper, ban them? they know what accounts are doing it... There is a reason for this cat and mouse, and its not ending with youtube banning people.
A lot of the current issues i see with it, is that it is treated like the go to service for video hosting...
Just consider image hosting... If i see an image in a thread and click it (much like people will do with youtube urls), and block the ad that was on the hosted site, is there this much uproar about it? That image hosting site might charge 5$ to do what an adblocker already does... If they wanna lock that up? actually lock it up, and remove the "service" portion of the business, otherwise I don't see any legs to stand on here.
Service in my eyes here, is a public service. This is a company posing as a public service, and occasionally deciding it hates how a % of the public is using their service. So they hand them a 10$ a month ticket that they pretend is required, but they will never take action on users who dont pay that ticket.
Oh, I despise this tactic so much. It means the company has known from the start that they can't offer it for free in the long term, but decided to subsidize it in order to gain a dominant position and get rid of competition. This breaks the conditions needed for a free market dynamics to work. In other words, they win market share for reasons other than efficiency, quality, or innovation. That's why some forms of government subsidies are prohibited under certain agreements, for example. Some multinational corporations have annual revenues larger than the GDP of many countries and can easily subsidize negative pricing for years to undercut competitors, consolidate market share, and ultimately gain monopoly power.
Also, the company has hinted false promises to the customer, as it signals that they have developed a business model where they can offer something for free. For example a two-sided marketplace where one side gets something for free to attract users and the other side pays (as it profits form these users). Users can't know something isn't sustainable unless the company explicitly states it in some way (e.g. this is a limited time offer).
So from the user's perspective, this is a bait-and-switch tactic, where the company has used a free offer in order to manipulate the market.
That's not monetization that's exploitation.
Would you feel the same if your phone suddenly updated so that your camera records in half quality unless you start paying monthly? It's their product, they can monetize it how they like.
Also wrt phone, it's different because I paid for the phone. But also I'd just use a different camera app?
I would hope most people anywhere would see that as a bad thing, especially given the scams and harms that ads are pushing.
I am not sure the best way to improve things, but anyone should be able to live a normal day of life without being forced to see any advertisement.
Maybe we should stop with that tired fallacious rhetoric? Just because you work at a massive company doesn’t make you “brilliant”.
The irony of your comment of accusing them of using fallacious rhetoric, is that your reply uses one of the most common fallacies of all: strawman fallacy
Their argument isn’t new, it’s just a rehash of “the most brilliant minds of our generation are working on trying to get you to click on ads”. My criticism was directed at the general argument, which is simply wrong. That comment is based on nothing except those people working at those corporations.
It is not a strawman because I am disagreeing with the conclusion as quoted, the reasoning being immaterial.
I am not sure those who work at Google are all brilliant - but it should also not matter, because they support Evil here. They should be ashamed for working for Evil. Guess if the money is right ...
Is the cleaner regularly removing poop stains from the personal toilet of a big and rich Google shareholder more useful than the qualified Google engineer working hard so a big number is very slightly bigger on one the shareholder’s list of numbers? I think the cleaner has more impact.
a) don't care
b) were desperate enough at the time, then, like that damn videogame, it sucked him in
it's too easy to get carried away by sheer technical complexity of optimization tasks, even if you are optimizing for bad.
This is where their most brilliant engineers have bested you, because they control the client too.
UPD found https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro... elsewhere in the thread
What is much more worrying is how aggressively Google tries to abuse its de-facto monopoly. I have said it before, I will say it again: Google abusing everyone else is a bad situation. We need to make Google smaller again.
Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.
Fuck you google.
One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate.
All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.
‘YouTube is failing because free tier is too expensive to be offset by ads’ and ‘YouTube premium is overly expensive’ can both be true. Shareholders care about maximising profits now, not overall product longevity.
Agree in principle, but I'd raise the serious question if Youtube is profitable in the first place. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded [1], so the storage growth given 1.5 GB/h is at least (not including compression, duplication across multiple DCs, edge nodes, whatever) 750 GB / minute, 45 TB / hour or 1.080 TB / day.
At 10 $/TB (and that is a figure from before the AI boom making all costs explode) they have to spend 10.800 $ per day just in HDD costs, on top of that comes the server hardware, racks, switches, datacenter construction costs, and then the cost of running all of that - electricity for the servers, cooling, internet egress bandwidth (in total, all video sites made up 65% traffic of the entire Internet pre-AI boom).
It is estimated that YT makes about 36 billion $ of revenue [3], assuming a split of 50/50 with creators [4] that means 18 billion $ end up in Youtube as gross revenue. From that, take off 10% for music licenses (estimated [5]), 25% for taxes (assuming for simplicity an average 20% corporate tax plus 5% VAT), that leaves 11.7 billion $. And that's... not that much, given that R&D, infrastructure investment, advertising expenses, costs of preferential deals with device manufacturers and phone carriers ("zero rating"), operational expenses (i.e. electricity, bandwidth) and headcount (moderation!) haven't been taken into account.
In the end, I think that unlike 2015 [6] Youtube is actually profitable - but barely, nowhere near close to the profit margins of Google Ads. Certainly not enough to appeal to the stonk markets and beancounters, and that is what drives the ever increasing push for ads and premium.
As a side question... I think what irks Google the most is that individual "influencers" can make millions of dollars in monthly income from sponsorships but Google sees nothing of that money at all.
[1] https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-upload...
[2] https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-ba...
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
[4] https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-y...
[5] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html
[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go...
We'll see. Until then, it's cheap and works fine.
What basic browser function is that? Video playback with the video tag? It's only been around for about 15 years and mainstream for 10 years.
* tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.
I've noticed YouTube likes to A/B test a lot. If you use it signed out you pretty much get a new set of minor changes each time.