How YouTube won the battle for TV viewers
wsj.com85 points by JumpCrisscross 7 days ago
85 points by JumpCrisscross 7 days ago
I'll come out and say that I am a full blown Youtube addict.
A lot of what I may watch on Youtube might be categorized as "background noise" - lots of talking head content that I can play on the background. Much of it is low quality and self-serious - but it's arguably much better quality than any equivalent "background noise" show on TV.
Ironically, I feel like longform Youtube content is actually better for my attention span and more rewarding - because creators aren't trying to appeal to broad audiences, they don't have to jump from topic to topic and keep things under a time limit.
I recently watched the Animagraffs video on the Hoover Dam and I was blown away. I have probably watched dozens of TV documentaries on the Hoover Dam over the year, but none of them actually just stop and methodically explained everything from top-to-down so thoroughly.
Even beloved shows like Mythbusters, there are now dozens of channels on Youtube that do all the same things we enjoyed Mythbusters for but better and with less filler and shmaltz.
> I'll come out and say that I am a full blown Youtube addict.
I was a YouTube addict until I think late last year. Something changed in the recommendation algorithm and my recommendations became so bad that these days I can hardly find anything interesting to watch on the front page. I dig things out from my subscriptions.
I still pay for YouTube and consider it money well spent, it is a great source of information.
Try going through your watch history and deleting stuff that isn't relevant to your current interests. My experience is that the recommendations are keyed very heavily (entirely?) off your watch history so, unlike most apps, you actually have quite precise control over what it recommends.
I'm really diligent about whenever I watch something that I don't want YouTube throwing more of at me, to just immediately delete it from my history. For example, if someone on Reddit mentions some funny dumb video, I'll watch it, but then delete it because I really don't want YouTube suggesting schlock to me.
I prune my watch history regularly, but something really changed late last year. The algorithm became like "oh, you've watched a single video about X, how about I show you these 89 other videos about X for the next week or so".
Yes I have observed this as well. It happens if I watch one off sports highlights on Youtube.
Most recently I watched a highlight video of Australia vs West Indies test cricket series my home page was endless cricket videos.
A few weeks before that I watched highlights from World Cup Asian qualifiers, for a week or so endless soccer videos.
I can't put my finger on it, but it also seems to prefer doing that for some topics than others. Some videos will have the effect you describe, while others will basically just disappear the whole topic after you watch the video. So far it feels like it prioritizes spamming you with videos on the same topic when the 'seed' video is shorter, more sensational and has some other elements of making the video more 'addictive'. Like it's trying to push you towards Shorts.
Pro tip: You can turn off your watch history entirely, and then you won't get recommendations (or shorts) on the YouTube home page (both on the web and mobile). I've found this to be the best way to use YouTube. No more "feed." Sadly, there seems to be no way to block recommendations that appear next to a playing video.
I actually really love the recommendations I get from YouTube.
My watch history is basically entirely my hobbies and interests and thus YouTube suggests more stuff related to those. A lot of it is channels I'm already subscribed to, but it does a good job of surfacing new channels that I wouldn't otherwise know about it.
> oh, you've watched a single video about X, how about I show you these 89 other videos about X for the next week or so
Just because I look up one video of “how to replace a toilet seat” doesn’t mean I am a connoisseur of toilets.
The other problem I run into is that no matter what I’m watching, I’m two autoplay videos away from Joe Rogan (and other right wing personas). Who knew something as innocent as listening about the economy of Iceland can be two videos away from why the Superman movie is too woke.
I like camping and knitting, so I watch a lot of those. YouTube is generally pretty good at understanding my interests, but every now and then it sees those and thinks "Doomsday prepper tradwife" and throws some of that nonsense my way and I have to remind it to not recommend any of that stuff.
I use the "dont recommend channel" option or "I don't like the video" liberally
I use my phone and Firefox Focus for looking up random videos on YouTube because of this.
I have taken this to an extreme, I suppose. I sequestered my Google Account entirely to a Firefox container on my PCs and pretty much the YouTube app and only the YouTube app on my phone. Most random videos I watch in Discord embeds and mobile Safari/Firefox views that are never logged in to my Google Account.
My YouTube ads (and Recaptcha experiences) have gotten terrible because Google seems to punish you more the less data you feed them, but for the most part I feel like I have control of the data that I do feed them (some of which is intentionally misleading because they have no right to know and I hate targeted ads; I love Spanish language ads, for instance, though my level of Spanish comprehension is stuck somewhere around first year of high school courses).
This is absolutely the biggest factor. I can forget to delete a single short clip a friend sends me from the watch history and still instantly know it the next time I browse the site because all of the sudden 1/3 of my recommendations are Lego videos or something equally as random.
The algorithms on most social media networks are dying. I think partially they can't account for all user interests and under-researched concepts/topics. So over-use of recommendation systems has the effect of alienating a large number of users.
The algorithms are way to primitive / stupid. When I watch just one video which explains rowing to show it to a visiting friend, my stream gets flooded with rowing videos afterwards.
When I watch a video describing a new lens for a Canon or Fuji system, I get flooded with videos for Nikon or Sony stuff later on. When I choose "not interested" I only get two options a) I watched this already (which YT should know obviously, as I'm a subscriber, or b) I don't like it. A useful option like "I don't have Nikon/Sony stuff" or something more specific like that isn't available.
Amazon for example uses an equally bad algorithm, it seems to be "industry standard" ...or even worse, because the don't need to offer me another fridge or washing machine once I ordered one. Idiocracy, sigh.
That is a interesting theory. When the users could select who to follow it was easier to get into your niche.
I am so glad I burned my feed addiction on crappy ranked motivational poster meme feeds 2012 something when the feeds still were bad.
It is something that would bring me down otherwise. Just like I never dared to even try WoW.
> I'll come out and say that I am a full blown Youtube addict. A lot of what I may watch on Youtube might be categorized as "background noise"
I'm like this too, but I prefer stuff like railfan videos that are short on words and long on landscape shots and monotony-quenching machine sounds. They never leave me with that feeling where my attention snaps back to the video in a way that makes me feel like I missed something and need to skip back a few seconds.
This channel is an especially-good example of what makes great background YT viewing to me: https://www.youtube.com/@7ideaproductions/videos
I would be a Youtube addict if their recommendation system didn't suck so bad. So many issues. There's gold in there but you, or at least me, rarely find it.
Instead
(1) Youtube recommends tons of channels of random creators who clearly just watched other channels and are now making copy-cat content.
(2) Youtube recommends insane channels - literally crazy people
(3) If I happen to watch anything I haven't watched before, suddently 30% ot 60% of my recommendations are for that channel. It has no way of knowing that it was a one off. I'm perfectly capable of going to that channel to see their other content if I thought it was good. If I don't go, then please take that as a signal that I didn't find it that interesting.
(4) even though I religiously select "not interested" it has no noticable effect
(5) They shovel shorts at me with their fucking inane "Ok, we'll show you less shorts" BS
At this point basically I have a few subscriptions of which only 1 updates daily, 2 update once or twice a month, the rest only periodically. Those I almost always watch when they have something new but most days there's 10-20 mins of content. Then, I look at the recommendations. See all the problems above and a few more I've mentioned before 20-50% music recommendations when I'm looking for video content and 20-40% recommending videos I already watched even though I'm looking for new content. So, I close the tab and do something else.
I know they won't do it but if they let Gemini watch all the videos and let me give Gemini detailed instructions I'm 1000% sure it would do extremely better for me. I don't know if it would be better for Youtube.
I'd like to give more specific instuctions like "Recommend French Language videos but only if they are business level French or higher, no beginner videos" or "Recommend news but never recommend anything about X or Y or Z as I'm just not interested in those topics". "Never recommend music or music videos. If I want music I'll go to music.youtube.com". etc etc
Shorts is why I stopped using YouTube. I wish I could just turn that brainrot off.
You can. There are extensions and scripts for exactly that. I never use the app, only browse via the web, even on mobile, just with a user agent switcher.
I've watched this video the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWsL8ME3ruk and it somehow helped me breaking my YouTube addiction for the last several weeks. Quite random but it really helped.
I still muscle memory enter youtube.com and I'm blown away how incredible addictive everything is setup there to be, the "algorithm" has trained the content creators to maximize their reach with incredible captivating thumbnails (and of course great content).
Best thing is to turn off recommendations and history, which can be done with YouTube. You can also use uBlock Origin to block even more controls (on YouTube on other websites too), which make websites more unintuitive to use.
I wrote an extension to deal with these sorts of addictions. One thing I noticed works incredibly well is only penalizing time spent with pages focused, so things like background music/documentaries are fine. You end up developing really intentional habits with the web and actually taking time seriously.
> Even beloved shows like Mythbusters
Not to mention, Adam Savage himself is also on youtube!
I bought an Nvidia Shield TV in 2019 expecting to do retro emulation stuff with it.
I use it 95% of the time for YouTube (via the wonderful SmartTube client).
Too bad the YouTube TV viewing experience sucks.
Don't get me wrong, I've been a subscriber for a very long time, and I get a lot of great content there. But going there to watch something specific, or watching a TV series, really sucks.
I recently realized a few studios (IIRC Warner Bros and Paramount) had put a lot of content there including movies and TV shows. I decided to watch Dick Van Dyke, because I'm a Carl Reiner fan. You can't really "Watch Next" a TV show and then go in to watch the next episode. And in fact sometimes it just wants to show you the shows in a non-linear order. "I want to watch the next Dick Van Dyke" is not something that YouTube makes easy. Another example, a friend recent sent me The Chit Show, I opened the playlist of the shows, and it played them in the reverse order (which I didn't really understand until the end when I realized I was on the first episode).
Also, the YouTube algorithm for suggesting things for you to watch is really bad. It gets stuck in ruts and it's hard to get out of them.
YouTube is amazing for learning DIY things, which is a large part of why I have subscribed for so long. But for watching entertainment the whole UI really just doesn't work.
> You can't really "Watch Next" a TV show and then go in to watch the next episode.
From the article:
A coming YouTube feature, called “shows,” can automatically queue the next episode on a channel, rather than serving whatever the recommendation algorithm thinks you’ll like best from billions of options.
[flagged]
Do you work for the YouTube UX team? What’s the deal with this incredibly out of pocket snarky reply to a list of genuine and reasonable gripes?
I feel like this is the result of the major streaming services cutting back on original content due to production costs, the 2023 strikes, and winning the broadcast fight.
Initially, streaming had to compete with broadcasting's long seasons by producing the equivalent amount of content, spread between more shows, with higher-quality production but much shorter seasons. Now streamers are providing fewer shows and only semi-annual seasons. It ends up leaving a lot of open viewing time with nothing fresh to watch.
YouTube also has the advantage of people making highlight reels of the most popular movies and series. We get out-takes, behind the scenes, bloopers, best quotes etc. Streaming services haven't figured this out (yet). I've never watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on TV, but I watched almost every monologue on YouTube.
Streaming services in general have become terrible.
What once was on ~3 platforms is now on ~10+ platforms. They constantly shuffle around who has what, new promising series are constantly killed because if they don't instantly become a worldwide sensation and the prices are rising non-stop.
At some point I just said screw it and left all of them.
I'm not sure the economics of big budget TV series work anymore unless you catch lightning in a bottle so I understand them cutting prod costs.
YouTube's economics are just so much better. YT provides no up front payment for content. The channels are almost infinite, microtargeted to everyone's interest. And the payout is proportional to the success of the content, and paid AFTER the audience has viewed. TV on the other hand has to make big bets before they know whether a show will be a hit.
I've had a TV for years but don't have cable and never watch broadcast. My TV is just a large ipad.
> major streaming services cutting back on original content due to production costs
Are we sure about that? Apple seems to keep making more and more TV shows instead of focusing on technical debt. Last I knew my phone didn't work right with Apple Intelligence or whatever "Siri" is supposed to be but we're on season 4 of whatever a Ted Lasso is.
I never get this argument. To see themselves without fresh content, I reckon people would have to expend at least some 4 hours every single day watching tv. Anyone watching this much TV should instead cut it down, it is fucking too much time wasted.
So much of the expensive "original content" is just crap. I'm happy the days when there's 20 minutes of new quality "original content". Most days there's nothing.
It’s not just about content funding. YouTube creators make content for any interest - and can compete for a small audience, while Netflix shows have to have mass appeal to recoup costs.
That alternatives to YouTube have come to naught feels unfortunately like a de facto monopoly.
Certainly it's because the content creators stay on YouTube because that's "where the eyeballs are". (Or rather, the money is to be made there on ad revenue ... because that's where the eyeballs are.)
I don't know how you break that. eBay is probably in the same enviable position.
It’s also really hard to compete with YouTube simply due to the cost of compute and storage associated with serving video. The costs are way higher than most any other type of website. You have to do transcoding and also store multiple versions of videos at different resolutions.
There are few companies with the resources to create a real competitor.
It’s even worse than you think, because by all accounts YouTube is absurdly expensive to operate. Some even claim to that this day it has still never turned a profit for Google. And if Google can’t make it work— with their own ad network, tons of their own fiber, their own operating system, etc.— it’s likely that nobody can. Hosting unlimited video for free is just stupefyingly expensive.
First, this is just a pervasive myth. Not that Google doesn’t operate money losing services: Blogger is a good example of that.
Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.
And, of course, Google+…
I’m absolutely talking out of my ass but I don’t think YouTube the company was profitable before the Google acquisition and I was under the impression that the increased aggressiveness about ads (displaying and preventing adblock) and the resulting YouTube premium push was a drive towards getting the YouTube subproject to be profitable.
It’s not impossible to make a video streaming platform profitable, but it definitely is hard and it likely isn’t possible with arbitrary unlimited free uploads.
It's speculated that YT wasn't profitable long after Google acquired it as well, it's still unclear as to if stand-alone it would be profitable, without the infrastructure benefits of being part of Google.
As a guy who builds big streaming services, I can definitely say profitability is a very hard thing to achieve. Even as compute costs go down, demand for features goes up and long-tail archive costs mount.
Hosting costs are only going down. Now with nuclear energy costs will continue dropping as well. Google doesn't break out costs but their last earnings report yesterday had YouTube revenue at $9.79 billion for the quarter. I find it hard to believe that it's not profitable.
Exactly. Also, people keep forgetting that Youtube doesn't just make money from ads. They also continue to introduce new revenue generating features such as the recent tips model.
"one billion hours of videos every day." according to Wiki.
So 9.79/365*4 = 11 cents per hour of video.
I dunno what you need to profit from 1h of video.
I was at a talk recently where a person from an ad supported streaming provider broke down their cost/revenue as part of the justification for some of their engineering decisions.
Basically you're lucky to get ad revenue of 10c per hour.
Ultimately, we need to convince DC to start enforcing monopoly laws again.
That won't work, Youtube is fundamentally dependent on massive storage, massive compute and massive internet connectivity PLUS a revenue mechanism for creators. A whole lot of infrastructure.
Monopoly laws and taxes are punitive. In other words: they can only ever create a situation where there is fundamentally less available. They cannot create a second Youtube, they can only destroy Youtube. Unless the government builds the infrastructure, which is a nonstarter.
If you cannot use state power and/or resources to create a second and third Youtube, then letting Youtube be a monopoly is probably the best option. The big difference between competitors and a monopoly is that a monopolist can only improve outcomes by growing the market ... which is exactly what we want.
Unfortunately it is very much not what the government wants. Well, it is not what governments (plural) want. Governments think they're god, and of course like two people in a madhouse that both think they're god, there is a rather fundamental disagreement here. They will realize, eventually, just how stupid it would be for god to let other gods (anyone but themselves, other governments, but also private people) control mass media. This means we will get closer and closer to the situation that Youtube cannot satisfy multiple governments. This could even apply to multiple parties within one state structure. You would hope this means they'll build infrastructure, but we all know what will really happen: they'll destroy it. Youtube will end because governments will see it as a threat to them, and they just won't care how much damage they're doing. Just look at the current government.
There are a LOT of economy texts, some quite old that warn about the dangers of letting private interests control the only market for anything. They suggest the government should make sure they own or at least control the market itself, but that includes paying for infrastructure. This has it's own problems (like censorship), but there is really no alternative. Either you do that or eventually the monopolists will BE the government.
YouTube isn't a monopoly. Quite a few creators I watch heavily promote their videos on other sites, usually targeted specifically at learning. I guess they get a better revshare there.
Unfortunately for them, I don't watch enough of their learning content to care about subscribing. But it's an option, and if I wanted to spend more time watching videos I could do so.
Operating a site with all the features and scale of YouTube is prohibitively difficult just because YouTube sets the bar so high, but operating a smaller more targeted competitor isn't. There are no barriers to entering the market. And that's largely thanks to Google and how they pushed so much video functionality into Chrome itself!
For most people, "entering the market" includes scoring high on virality, or even just "potential for virality". If not on YT or TikTok (or maybe insta too), it is very, very, very hard to score highly for those metrics.
> Youtube is fundamentally dependent on massive storage, massive compute and massive internet connectivity PLUS a revenue mechanism for creators. A whole lot of infrastructure.
Yes, and YouTube essentially gets all of this infrastructure from its parent company for free and still operates at a loss. So no other company who doesn't already have such infrastructure for other purposes can effectively compete with YouTube, and all such attempts were effectively destroyed by YouTube because YouTube could offer better services while still operating at a loss.
Monopoly laws should've prevented a situation like this.
Of course YouTube wouldn't be able to provide its services at current scale if it didn't have Google backing. But perhaps that could've made the current content market better. If YouTube had to place some restrictions on uploaded content because it wouldn't afford unlimited storage and bandwidth, it wouldn't push creators to make every video 10+ minutes long, and if creators had to pay at least some minimal fees (while they could still get residuals from ads if the video was successful) to post videos, we wouldn't have so much low quality videos there. And the competition could maybe give us better features we don't even dream of today.
It makes around $40 billion a year in revenue. I find it hard to believe it operates at a loss.
It's not a monopoly. Tons of other sites successfully host and profit from videos, such as TikTok facebook etc.
> Monopoly laws and taxes are punitive. In other words: they can only ever create a situation where there is fundamentally less available.
The breakup of Ma Bell had its flaws, but it ABSOLUTELY created a situation where there was more available.
Yeah I'm not sure what the parent is getting at. The point of breaking up Google or "destroying" YouTube is to remove the entity sucking the air out of the market. The vacuum it leaves is opportunity for new entrants in a proven market.
It is not monopoly laws, it is anti-competition laws. It's not anti-competitive to have a monopoly from a superior product:
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
> Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal
YouTube is mostly popular, but it doesn’t really stand out in any technical way.
Content creators prefer YouTube because it has more users, and each creator is afraid that their followers wouldn’t follow them to another platform. Even content creators focused on open source or self-hosting kind of tech.
Honestly, I really wonder if users would refuse to follow creators whom they like to another platform. Are most people really that adverse to just watching videos on another website?
Watching videos on other websites isn't the issue, but where are you going to find new videos to watch? Where are you going to search to find a video on a specific thing, a recipe, a how-to, or some other more obscure thing?
Right now that's YouTube and TikTok.
If I want to follow someone, I’d use RSS, or subscribe to a newsletter.
If I want to find videos on a specific topic, I use a search engine. DuckDuckGo yields much better results than YouTube, even when the results are hosted on YouTube itself.
Sure, searching with an external search engine is an option, but YouTube and TikTok also just bring videos to you. In other words, they offer passive discovery you just don’t get with a search engine.
It’s fine if that’s not what you want, but people do love it and it keeps them going back to YouTube and TikTok.
> Honestly, I really wonder if users would refuse to follow creators whom they like to another platform. Are most people really that adverse to just watching videos on another website?
My wife and I watch ~15 hours of YouTube together each week, entirely on our Apple TV. If someone we watch were to move to another platform, we just wouldn't watch them anymore. Honestly even if there is an Apple TV app for the other platform, it's still unlikely we'd switch over just to watch them instead of filling up their "time slot" with someone else.
I sponsor several creators on Patreon, I don't watch early release videos because that would require me to log into Patreon and follow the link.
I've told the creators that I follow that I'm paying to enable them to do what they do, I don't need any more return than that.
I tried Nebula and others, honestly the content was either unappealing, low quality recycled material, or it took too long to find something interesting. The variety of YT is important and I'd also say 30% of my selections are based on duration, fitting the content into my lifestyle as well as my mood.
We do the same thing. There are a couple of channels we watch on YouTube who forego ads and use Patreon to fund their livelihoods; we'd be sad to see them disappear, so I started supporting them with a monthly donation on Patreon. They offer the same early release perks, but like you said, the variety of our YouTube subscription feed is important. I could binge all of these creators' videos on Patreon if I wanted to, but my wife and I aren't opening YouTube to binge just one type of video.
It is partly the network effect. However all the alternatives having serious issues:
- Odysee - has performance issues and the app is crap and no discoverability. Some niche, interesting content on there but a lot of the time I only used it because someone would upload Joe Rogan stuff while he was exclusive to Spotify.
- BitChute - full of racists and not a lot else, crap discoverability. The website feels like something from the 2000s.
- Rumble - US/UK right wing slop politics and conspiracy rubbish from David Icke wannabes. I don't like the interface at all. Tends to work okay. But there is very few things I want to watch/listen to on there. Discoverability isn't great.
- Daily motion - I remember it being decent a decade ago, but it has fallen behind and turned into something else from briefly looking at the home page.
- Twitch - Streaming platform only, I think. There is a lot of slop left wing politics on it and (for want of a better term) "titty streamers". I have visited the site once, not for me.
- Kick - Basically Twitch but has more permissive T&C. Bankrolled by Stake.com IIRC. I watch one live show if I am awake to watch it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother with it.
I spend most of my time on YouTube watching stuff either about Computers, Repairing 4x4 trucks, Weird Soviet Era vehicles, WW2 stuff by Mark Felton or some sort of Tech related stuff. None of that is catered to on the alternative sites at all. None of that is catered by TV particularly well either.
- Odysee - Has an easily accessible RSS feed, a link to download every video and it has no ads. Unfortunately nothing original going on here. Just a repository for YouTube's sloppy seconds.
- BitChute - If you can get past the 'racists' and the MGTOW gayness that dominates the front page, this site has a rather large catalog of free movies available.
- Rumble - If you can get past the political slop, this site streams a lot of NFL sportsball for free .
- Twitch - I used to go here to watch my sportsball but the site is now overexposed, old and busted. Can't go five seconds with a copyright notice appearing.
Non Youtube contents such as TV broadcast needs to get streaming done right. And they haven't done it. Apple or Google could have helped here. Where All Broadcast TV are in one place / App just like a normal TV. And the content will be streamed in decent quality. But neither are they interested as Youtube belongs to Google and Apple is going with Apple TV+ direction and wants to own TV itself.
It is such a sad state of things since Steve Jobs passed away both Apple and Google have a complete lack of taste and product sensibility to deliver something truly helps the customers. Instead every product and features are marketing or sales driven.
In an ideal world, each streaming service would provide the service itself, users can pick whichever app they like, and connect that app to the services they use.
In the real world, each company wants to be THE number one streaming platform, and wants users to use their app above all else. So each company reinvents the same things, and users need to deal with the mess of N apps for N services.
The idea of cooperation is completely alien in big tech companies. Descentralisation is perceived as dangerous, since it doesn’t let each individual be the number one.
In the end, because everyone want to be the number one and screw the rest, they all end up sucking. This is obviously predictable, but management everywhere remains oblivious of it.
> In the real world, each company wants to be THE number one streaming platform, and wants users to use their app above all else. So each company reinvents the same things, and users need to deal with the mess of N apps for N services.
The companies do not care about app usage. They care about subscription fees, which are highly (though somewhat elastically) dependent on a platform's available content. They don't give a damn what you watch with, they just want you to pay. They already know there will be no 600lb gorilla in streaming, so it's all about getting another month of fees from you, and that is unrelated to app usage.
The app usage isn't the end goal, but it's an important middle step to the strategy. While you're using one platform, they don't want you to be reminded that other platforms exist or easily browse them.
I wonder what it's like in various countries. I was surprised that Japan came up with that, TVer which basically all broadcast shows end up on for at least one week, shown with ads. AFAIK it's driven by a coalition of broadcasters with nothing to do with the big platforms - where there's a will there's a way I guess.
Apple and Google tried that for years on their TV platforms and the content providers aggressively blocked them.
E.g. Netflix outright refuses any kind of integration where their content would be surfaced next to other services - their product managers DEMAND that people go to their app into their owned experience to access content.
And designers/product managers at other content providers are the same.
Netflix refusing to integrate is a huge pain. I recently set up an Apple TV box for a non-technical parent, and while most services can be effectively navigated with the system-level voice search, Netflix is the odd one out and so I suspect Netflix is going to go mostly unwatched.
Netflix wants 100% of your attention on _their_ content.
Instead of "channel surfing" and picking a competitor's production they want to keep viewers inside their walled garden.
This could easily have happened. Apple especially lets anyone fit their catalog into the TV app. It's the non-Apple and non-Google part of the equation that chose the current system.
There are additional requirements involved with getting the catalog in TV App. And Apple obviously are not willing to share accurate user count numbers as well as a lot of other data. Once they said they are Apple's customer and not those TV / Broadcasting customers that was the end of the conversation.
> All Broadcast TV are in one place / App just like a normal TV. And the content will be streamed in decent quality.
Isn’t that what YouTube TV is? The problem with YouTube TV is that it’s essentially the old expensive cable model that everyone was trying to get away from in the first place.
BBC has been doing streaming likely longer than you've been aware of streaming -- it left beta in 2007, same time that Netflix started streaming in the US.
The content is nowhere near as addictive as youtube though, partly because the format is still television and still built with a television executive mindset.
TV channels have been forced to produce TV shows that will draw the biggest audiences. they've not innovated online either.
Streaming services make great shows then stop them after one season or force one episode a week. they also drop then pick back up shows constantly.
YouTube let's people watch the kinds of shows they want to watch and let's people create the kind of shows they want to create. everyone wins, including YouTube! plus they do music, smaller artists, bigger artists and mashups in between. it's all just there fairly reliably and it works on every platform.
They just don't produce very good tv shows anymore. There is nothing to watch.
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
YouTube is apparently #1 in music streaming as well, which I found surprising.
so did I until I found myself using YouTube music over Spotify more and more. it has all the standard music but also includes more remixes and smaller artists. the most important thing is that it doesn't mix podcasts in with music and you can easily view your own playlists!
haven't used Spotify in any meaningful way in a few years now.
Same. Also, my Spotify auto generated playlists hadn't changed for several years. I finally got fed up and googled around only to find it was a known issue. Clearly somebody realized they could just turn off those expensive GPUs...
The reason I've always used YouTube Music over the competition is that it includes whatever-the-hell anyone uploads on YouTube.
So, while Spotify can't get the rights (or the data) for that band that played down the pub one time in 1987, someone happened to record them and put them on YouTube and now they have royalties sat accruing somewhere and I get to listen to them on a nostalgia binge.
In terms of subscribers or actual use?
I have YT Premium, so I automatically get YT Music. I would much rather pay less and drop the Music app. I almost never use it and don’t like it. I can’t justify buying for another service on top of this, so I went back to managing a local library and manually syncing all my music to my phone like it’s 2007.
A side effect of YouTube treating music special is that I can’t read comments on the TV for videos that it thinks are music. I find this very annoying. The same video will have comment on mobile or the computer.
My gripe is that when you try to sync over a library from, say, Spotify, you’ll end up subscribed to hundreds of artist’s YouTube channels in your main TV app, and playlists are basically shared too. Which I do not want at all
Yep. This is one of the reasons I don’t really use YT Music. The shared playlists are a nightmare. If someone tells me to check out a song, I might go there to listen to it as a one-off, but that’s about it. It’s so poorly done for anyone who also uses YouTube, which I assume is everyone.
Quick tip: You can see the comments on such videos (at least on my TV), the comments button not shown but clicking on the video title to open the description also shows the comments.
YT Music arguably has a much larger library than any of its mainstream competitors (since it can also draw from music videos uploaded to Youtube).
Also, better audio quality in my subjective opinion.
Went to a wedding, 10 years ago even, and the "kids" DJ-ing the wedding party were pulling up music on YouTube.
(To be sure, this was very much a low-key affair, teens there with their parents were "DJ-ing" — but I was still surprised that is was YT. Just vanilla YT, pulling up "videos" and hitting "play".)
YouTube is pretty common for in-person, social music sharing because it's the least friction. It's hard to share between Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, and personal collections from the same device. YT search will usually find pretty much everything.
It's because most music in on youtube, and the audio quality is good enough for the average joe running bluetooth speakers or whatever, and it's free+usable without an acount unlike all the other music services. Free is the most important part.
Not surprising, Youtube has tracks that Spotify does not. Live stuff, unofficial bootlegs, out of print B-sides, the lot. Some are "official" but many are user-uploaded. Youtube has enough legal power to keep those online I suppose, where smaller operations like Grooveshark did not.
YT Music is a dollar cheaper than Spotify, and generally better; it's also included in YT Premium, so if you already have that, 'may as well'.
I dont believe that is the case, and I cant any reference to it. Nearly all are pointing to Spotify as number one both in terms of revenue and market shares.
The thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.
I always wondered if this would be the case. All non-tech-nerd people I know share Spotify links that I can't open (yes, I can download another app, no I'm not going to do that).
I use Youtube extensively for discovering new music and new artists. Sometimes (1 out of 100 times) I find myself on Soundcloud for a song that's not on Youtube, but for the rest Youtube is just perfect. I always wondered how many people use Youtube for music streaming... apparently a lot.
personally i havent watched tv or listened to the radio on my own accord in many years because there are too many ads. i like the idea of not being able to choose the content im engaging in but it feels like 70% ads and 30% content
One thing I wished YouTube had like Twitter was to see what other channels the channels you like to subscribe. This way you are not held hostage by YouTube recommendation, which is definitely not in favor of the viewers
TV is hot garbage now.
YT has solid channels, from DIY to black hole talks and most importantly, uncensored news.
TV is just ADs and more ADs, garbage content after garbage content. Not everything is pretty tho, YT has a complete monopoly and there is nothing anybody can do about it, the alternatives suck with some silly subscription when there is no even content.
I do pay for Youtube Premium since Youtube Music is hands down better than Spotify. I would pay for alternative services to help them out IF they were worth it. YT Premium is the only subscription I pay and happy to do so, I see value.
Is YT Premium 100% ad-free?
I get the feeling that if many users start using Premium, at some point they'll see ads again.
Not only is it ad-free, they provide a "skip advertisement" feature for in-video ads.
Technically it's a "skip commonly skipped section" usually that includes in-video ads, but also long introductions, filler spaces and any other bits that enough people care to manually skip a few times
YT-Premium is still ad-free, though they did bump up the prices recently.
Being a monopoly gives them that kind of power, but they haven’t gone overboard—probably because they know regulators would start poking around if they did.
Yes, but as YouTube payments to videographers have dropped, most have started filling the gap by having sponsored content inside the video, which is harder to skip and avoid.
youtube does not put ads before, during or after a video for a premium subscriber. creators are in control of the content within that video (and that could include sponsored segments). if that is an issue, you will need to skip those or use something like SponsorBlock.
Premium has a "skip section" button for those.
Is that the new button that's been popping up? And here I was blaming SponsorBlock.
very curious what is meant by uncensored news.
I think it's the sort of news that doesn't sound as though all the news channels had a meeting and decided to say the same thing at the same time.
> most importantly, uncensored news
I would like evidence of this because I hear constantly how certain topics are persona non grata on YT, and will be pulled or shadowbanned to page 1001 of results.
I take that to mean not from any big name news organisation. I do see a variety showing up in recommendations.
I unsubbed from YT premium when I realized the only feature I was really paying for was not being bombarded by ads every 30 seconds of video. Sometimes you'll get back to back aggressive ads within only a handful of seconds. The purpose seems to be to annoy you into purchasing a subscription, which is really predatory and annoying. Or locking "features" behind a paywall basically every other app provides, like continuing playing even when the app is in the background made me eventually annoyed enough to just cancel, and I can somewhat tolerate the ads. If not it forces me off the app sometimes which is not what I had intended but is a nice side effect.
It would be one thing if the ads weren't incredibly annoying by themselves, the content is either really, really weird, seemingly AI generated, or annoying, or some combination of all of those. I cannot imagine who they are for.
And you don't use ublock for the free version? Or is there no alternative blocking option for mobile?
WhY dOn’T yOu JuSt UsE uBlOcK is not a retort to what I am saying.
It wasn't a retort, it was an honestly curious question about why you'd tolerate being bombarded with ads if an easy solution exists that doesn't require paying. Simple enough, no?
This has always been my philosophical objection to paying for YT premium: You're not really paying for any additional feature--you're paying them to stop tormenting you with ads. "The free version should be deliberately unpleasant so they pay to make it pleasant" just isn't a business model I want to support as a customer.
I’d say 98% of my YouTube views are on the AppleTV.
I ditched Chromecast recently. They made YouTube too heavyweight for the Chromecast Ultra, to the point it regularly crashed. The new "Chromecast With Android TV" is barely more specs and has broken the interface by being... Android TV. Rather than take a well deserved second place, they chased Apple's design and ruined their niche.
Worse still, the best replacement I could find... Was Apple TV. So now I'm on that ecosystem.
Does it use a different app on the Ultra? I'm still using my second generation and (aside from some nonsense earlier this year about expired certificates) still going strong - can't ever remember it "Crashing".
Perhaps it's not "app weight" but more specific to the 4k video or SoC implementation?
The algorithm has done well by me. It brought me Davie504, Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili playing Rhapsody in Blue, ICEPEAK, Ningen Isu, Rock Fujiyama, a Hungarian choir singing Metallica, and Donner Pass railroad/snowplow porn. Just a subset.
I have recently been using technology to create long form videos on youtube and it has been a lot of fun to do edutainment https://www.youtube.com/@studyturtlehq
I wish there were better ways to monetize it.
Jellyfin is really popular in our house. Everyone associates YouTube with quick and dirty dumb content. Garbage "looping" style content is allowed in private, but long form content on a screen or playing aloud has to be something that is an actual 30+ minute thing with a point to it.
You need to subscribe to better YouTube channels. I stopped watching regular TV (including Netflix, etc), because YouTube is much more erudite and I actually learn things rather than passively consuming dramas.
There are a lot of really amazing TV and movies from the last 60 years. It seems we never have time to get around to finishing what we want, but I am genuinely curious what my wife and kids think about various scenarios presented in shows like Black Mirror.
Likewise, despite their inaccuracy, movies like The Imitation Game or A Beautiful Mind led me to look at the life of Alan Turing beyond just what I learned in college.
Consuming content is very much a time-blocked thing for me. I have some YouTube content I consume to stay up with various AI/ML groups, etc. but that is closer to work-related and not something I will put on during a break from work as that will defeat the purpose of recharging my brain.
It's also interesting to see how movies or shows capture small details that change over time.
Since this isn't a defense of Google but of the many clever creators on YouTube, I can comfortably applaud so much of their work. YouTube isn't at all about just garbage content. It has no shortage of that, but it also has absolutely no shortage of truly fantastic, educative, production-worthy videos and channels of all kinds. I mean some truly excellent ones here, that are easily as good as or very often much better than anything I used to see for documentaries on network or cable TV. That so many of them are made at a fraction of those old documentary budgets and by completely independent creators (often just some guy working from his home studio) is an incredible achievement of modern media technology and innovation.
The YT algorithm will often promote to you more that's similar to whatever you've already watched, so if you actually start seeking out a certain type of quality content, you'll find more of it being recommended. I carefully pick the things I take the time to view or play in the background while im working on household chores and so far haven't had any shortage of genuinely great things to enjoy.
YT has its many flaws, but one of them certainly isn't a shortage of quality vidoes about nearly anything you could want to know about.
There are many great YT creators and content.
One major problem I have with YT is that there is no concept of a "time budget" by the creators themselves. They are heavily incentivized to produce a lot of content. In the same way we see market distortions in the gaming space, where whales overshadow the general audience of the game, we basically see that in YT with how time budgeting works.
Most creators will succumb to this eventually and start making content longer and less respectful of your time.
Contrast that with a movie or TV show that has an actual time budget.
In the same way that SponsorBlock has really cut down on the time we watch YT content by skipping the intros, sub reminders, etc. I feel like a lot of YT content that is 25 minutes could be realistically condensed down into 3 minutes if a person wasn't just trying to fill time to pay their bills.
>I feel like a lot of YT content that is 25 minutes could be realistically condensed down into 3 minutes if a person wasn't just trying to fill time to pay their bills.
Not sure what kind of content you're watching or seeking, or your particular attention span, but I specifically appreciate the channels and videos in which they take their time to give me a meaty, detail rich video on something interesting, and if covering it all takes 25 minutes to an hour, all the better as long as they're delivering quality information (which most do). This is how informational documentaries should be, instead of being presented as moronic, information-barren shorts and reels.
I don't deny that what you describe happens, but among good content creators it's rare.
I wouldn't want a video that "optimizes" a complex subject down to 3 shitty minutes. Finding out new things shouldn't be condensed into nuance-destroying tiktok reels that reinforce an inability to pay attention for much longer than it takes to have a piss.
Totally depends on the type of content. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's "Two minutes of interesting content stretched into 10 minutes because of ad revenue."
> thing with a point to it.
I'm less caring about which services are watched or games are played. But intentionality is key. The decision is made before the action is started as to what the point of the time is.
Don't get me wrong, "looking to zone out for 30mins due to a tiring day" is as valid as anything else - I'm not some kind of "always be hustling" guy.
But just turning something on mindlessly is not allowed.
> actual 30+ minute thing with a point to it
Good point. I hardly see any movies anymore and lately I found that what I miss is a good story. Some Youtube channels come close, but these are all 'garden variety' stories, so to speak.
Worse for television I have a PVR so I fast forward through the TV adverts... YouTube is about the only place left I sit through video adverts.
For me...
TV costs money
Youtube is free... and i can block the ads
When I visit the link I get:
Access blocked.
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Automated (bot) activity on your network [...]
Use of developer or inspection toolsYouTube could be so much better. But because the alternatives are so bad, they full on monopoly it.
They could fix the bot problems, they could bring back dislikes, they should show downvotes on comments, comment history in profiles and an inbox for replies, search is broken, shorts is terrible, etc etc....
Good fucking ridance. Youtube is also shit, but I cant help but cheer the demise of deep state controlled traditional media..