I’m just surprised this hasn’t already happened already…
Same reason Microsoft or Adobe do not stop piracy. They want to create friction that pushes people to pay, but if they fully blocked adblockers then it could create an impetus for a competitor to become popular.
And then you have companies like Google who are going all in on adblocking because that is their entire revenue stream.
Only enough to make the average user comply.
Again, enough friction.
The original post is about Google
You realize google owns youtube, right?
That would result in a mass exodus of their users and potentially result in their competitor popping up. Imagine the 2023 Reddit API controversy, but things going a lot worse for Reddit. Had Reddit taken a more extreme approach and made it entirely impossible to use any 3rd party apps instead of permitting workarounds for users to modify their apps, then they would’ve lost a lot of relevancy and would actually have suffered financially.
The smart way to do this would be to slowly implement anti-user practices over a long period of time, and let your corporate bootlickers gaslight the rest of the users into thinking that everything is fine and that they’re only overreacting.
The greedy little pigboy didn’t do that because the IPO was coming up too fast
Except who wants to be YouTube?
Twitch only does streaming. Meta and TikTok only do short form video. Spotify’s attempts to branch into video seem focused on podcasts and curated content. If YouTube were to erase from existence, I don’t see a competitor getting made.
I don’t see a competitor getting made.
That’s the neat part. Why make it if you could just buy it? All it takes is for a rich authoritarian asshat with too much money and a desire to push an agenda.
Kind of hard to buy something that doesn’t exist.
Well, you’d lose support for devices which can’t handle software DRM playback, old YouTube clients installed on things like TVs which no longer get updated, if you want to support things that only get Widevine L3 support (most devices) you’re not really going to move the needle since Widevine L3 had been broken since like forever, etc.
The main thing YouTube would gain in practice from such a move would be to get DMCA as a legal tool to crack down on people ripping YouTube videos, but that’d require some very significant resources invested into driving Legal processes against average consumers ripping videos, and the return on investment for that is almost certainly abysmal.
EDIT: I thought of two more reasons:
- Given the enormous scale of YouTube’s transcoding pipeline, just adding in a DRM step into the mix will cost non-significant amounts of money
- All old content will remain non-DRM, because a re-transcode of the full YouTube catalog would cost an impossible amount of money
Compatibility with older clients. It will also break some embedded videos on other sites too.
If they do, they risk losing customers to other platforms. So far, they decided not to take that risk.
This… kills the site.
(Would see Vimeo or similar take over in about 5 months)
Vimeo is a video hosting platform but it isn’t anywhere near YouTube replacement. It would be such a massive shift in their business model that trying to make it one would result a second dead site
There is no algorithm and search function, I don’t even think there’s a notification feature. Vimeo is mostly for artists to upload to and manually send the link
It is worse in that Vimeo makes money by charging creators to host their content instead of YouTube’s model of it being free or a way to make money.
Didn’t even think of that but yeah true. They aim for quality over quantity and it should stay that way
Things change, and full DRM would hasten that change. YT is a platform, they don’t own the content.
That doesn’t really have any impact on my point. They’re similar in a few ways but it’s like suggesting Wikipedia becomes an IMDB replacement, it would completely change the brand
I will not install DRM on my devices.
I already just use screen capture recording to take videos in my desktop playing YouTube on a browser. Could they even stop that?
I mean that’s what DRM stops…
You can’t record it, its just a blackscreen…
You can try it. Or Try asking a friend/relative to screenrecord their netflix… its just black
I mean unless you literally take out a camera to record it… but then the video quality degrades since you aren’t gonna get a 1:1 from making a videotape of a screen.
From a quick google search, seems like you can disable hardware acceleration to record with OBS. Or you can use other dedicated software. And thats not even covering the bypasses that can likely be done on Linux
To add, you could always capture via the output video too, regardless of the DRM nonsense. Once it leaves the device in a format a display can present it, any device that can utilize that signal can record it.
There’s always a million ways to skin the cat.
This is what i figured, so long as you can output to a generic non drm enabled monitor like a VGA, you can just feed it back into a digital capture device. It might take some work / bandwidth to do it much faster than 1:1 time, but it just needs one person to do it once. In likelihood there’s a software way to do it perhaps with the right hacks to a display driver.
It is often the graphics hardware blocking it in this case… disabling hardware decoding in the browser may ‘help’, if your CPU can handle it (you can still use hardware encoding, tho)
I mean that’s what DRM stops…
…and nobody wants that.
deleted by creator
So what are you trying to tell?
Nope
Netflix being an application that is running on a TV seems like a very different situation than a video playing inside of a browser. How exactly would YouTube know or be able to stop screen recording short of forcing me to actively run a program?
The browsers implement the DRM protections. It will be black if you try to record.
idk how they do it, but browsers have DRM built right into it, you can play a stream from netflix but if you try to record it, its just a blackscreen…
Youtube could implement the same thing… I mean Google literally made Widewine
Also, apparantly you also need Secure Boot and TPM enabled to get the full HD content, otherwise it runs on Widewine L3 instead which only displays content in Standard Definition… not HD.
You can also run Netflix in a browser
