YouTube should paywall 4K videos

[Retro]

Before your sense of outrage explodes, hear out Linus Tech Tips for why YouTube should paywall 4K videos. It's basically to do with spiralling costs about which Linus has full details and it's hard to argue with it.

Personally, I could live with free Full HD videos on my 4K monitor as they're still pretty clear and maintain the same YouTube experience and featureset, so not such an issue for me, although I would miss it.

Also, note that the Brave web browser nukes YouTube ads like nothing else. Of course, this eats into YT's business model, but it seems they're ok with Brave doing this since they could stop them doing this if they wanted to, so who am I to argue?

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[live627]

My initial guess was correct: bandwidth/videos size.

I still use my Dell Ultrasharp U2713H that I bought used off Ebay in 2014 and will keep it until it dies. Between theater mode and having Firefox take a third of the screen, I only ever need 1080p. My computer cannot handle 4k video, not to mention 360 degree video.

 

[Arantor]

I was with him up until the point he applied Moore’s Law to storage drives.

But he’s not wrong that 4K uses disproportionately more resources for disproportionately less benefit and how small the creator + audience space is.

Personally I don’t care, I don’t usually have YT videos open large enough to even warrant 1080p in general, because I don’t watch YT on a big screen… but I do pay for premium because I don’t want ads, while I do want to support the creators.

Also I couldn’t possibly touch Brave all the time it enthuses crypto and I personally dislike the politics of its CEO and founder.

 

[Crims]

It will no doubt be an excuse to remove things that are more relevant, like Google typically does.

 

[Retro]

I still use my Dell Ultrasharp U2713H that I bought used off Ebay in 2014 and will keep it until it dies.

I'm not surprised, as they make great monitors. Just looked up a review which gave it an excellent rating.

Personally I don’t care, I don’t usually have YT videos open large enough to even warrant 1080p in general, because I don’t watch YT on a big screen… but I do pay for premium because I don’t want ads, while I do want to support the creators.

Also I couldn’t possibly touch Brave all the time it enthuses crypto and I personally dislike the politics of its CEO and founder.

I'm surprised that you hate Brave so much that you don't simply use it for YT videos exclusively and save the money. That's what I do. Of course, if you want some of the other features, like downloads, then you have to pay it.

 

[Arantor]

Of more practical use to me than the ads is the ability to background play on an iPad where I can put things in the background/picture in picture, and then have something else in the foreground.

The other question is, well, how morally justified *is it* to block ads? There is the practical dimension - blocking ads protects you against a source of malware for sure. It also improves your overall performance - less data being pushed around etc., and there's the privacy angle to consider too.

But on the flip side, there's a distinct number of people on YT that rely on their videos for income - and blocking their ads from YT either directly or indirectly hurts them in so doing because at best you just don't fund them and you hit Google in the wallet for the hosting/bandwidth, in the worst case you're defunding a creator who might just stop making videos if they're not able to afford to keep making videos.

 

[Retro]

Putting background play behind the paywall is a clever move by Google. Yes, it's pretty irritating to be forced to have the video have the focus in order to play, especially if you just want to listen to music as it stops you doing anything else with the iPad.

Yes, the morality side of it is a grey area for sure. However, my personal blockage is a drop in the financial ocean so small that it's not even a rounding error so I don't worry about it.

I find the interruption by those ads intensely irritating, especially the long 15 second ones at the start.

Thing is, I'd actually pay that subscription, but I feel it's unreasonably high, so Google get nothing at all instead for their greed.

I wonder if using Brave truly deprives Google of revenue though, since they could block it so easily. Also, I seem to remember that they've got some sort of partnership with them beyond the Chrome rendering engine, so perhaps they're data mining Brave users even more than usual and hence getting indirect income that way. This is speculation on my part.

 

[Arantor]

I don't know, but I also don't want to know. Brave's CEO is responsible for more frustration and drama in my life than I care to admit, because he is Brendan Eich, the man who created JavaScript.

 

[Retro]

Evil, evil man, tsk.