So now there's YouTube app (which doens't allow me to listen to a talk offline on an airplane or background or pay for YouTube Red), YouTube Music app (which I'm not allowed to use at all), YouTube Gaming (which has an UI and UX build by a madman). Then there's AndroidTV version of YouTube app which has severe feature limitations and probably some others as well. I don't really like to be negative, but it doesn't seem that Google has any idea what to do with YouTube or any interest of expanding it to EU and the rest of the world. Not to mention the rampant catastrophe that's ContentID police system that's benefiting only large corporate abusers with no recourse.
So I wonder, will I perhaps be able to watch talks and other videos on an airplane now using YouTube Go? Which subset of functionality will work on this soon-to-be-abandoned app? Does it even address any of the issues that content creators, Google and us users have with the platform?
Try youtube-dl (before the international copyright police C&D it). I'm sure there's an app wrapper that can handle intents (NewPipe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12591466), and then you can open the videos in the VLC app.
The owners of YouTube do not have it in their best interest to provide you with flexible, no-nonsense tools.
It has better performance on my old laptop, especially when I hook it up to a 1080p screen. Seeking is more instant. It starts much quicker.
It's more minimal in the interface (basically full-screen with a bunch of kbd shortcuts) but has all the features I need (including playback speed), and even some that are not in VLC--for instance, VLC has a key to advance 1 frame ('e', IIRC) and mpv can step both ways (with ',' and '.').
A few downsides: it doesn't seem to have playlist functionality (not that VLC's playlist UI is that great, but it works). to load a subtitle file, you either need to specify it on the command line or it needs to match the filename exactly, in VLC you can just drag'n'drop any subtitle onto the player to load it or use an Open File dialog. mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).
On the whole, I use mpv for almost anything. Indeed in combination with youtube-dl, I've made an alias for `youtube-dl <URL> --exec "mpv --fs --fs-screen 1 {} &"`, which starts the player immediately after download, full-screen, on the second (big) monitor. I still use VLC whenever I want to watch multiple short videos in a playlist. And of course VLC on Android because it's really for both video as well as playing music--although I feel there should be a better musicplayer, one that allows me to browse my collection through the file system instead of tags (which VLC does) but has a real smooth UI to manage playlists (which has been clunky in most Android players I've tried).
>mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).
There is a setting for this called "After Playback". By default it is "close" but you can also "play next" (video in the folder, useful if shows are organized by folder and by episode) and other options, including "do nothing" or "play from beginning".
I'm at work so don't remember exactly where to change this setting.
I guessed as much, didn't look for it because until typing the above comment I never realised this was one of my minor annoyances with mpv :) Will change the setting in my config soon :)
The naming was from a different media player. I also mixed up "Play Next" with a different media player unfortunately. I believe mpv requires you add the next items to the playlist. However if you intend to play the folder anyways, you should just call the subdirectory and mpv will treat it as a playlist.
But I found the relevant mpv config I was thinking of:
--idle=<no|yes|once>
Makes mpv wait idly instead of quitting when there is no file to play. Mostly useful in input
mode, where mpv can be controlled through input commands.
> A not too crappy GPU. mpv is not intended to be used with bad GPUs. There are many caveats with drivers or system compositors causing tearing, stutter, etc. On Windows, you might want to make sure the graphics drivers are current, especially OpenGL. In some cases, ancient fallback video output methods can help (such as --vo=xv on Linux), but this use is not recommended or supported. (o)
Whereas VLC has a similar option but it's sort of an afterthought and you have to activate it, from the wiki:
> The VLC media player framework can use your graphic card (a.k.a. GPU) to accelerate decoding of video streams depending on the video codec, graphic card model and operating system.
In addition to what others have already said, VLC also has a bug with certain graphics cards (I want to say Nvidia?) - resulting in washed out/off-color video. It can be "fixed" with great-but-not-quite-perfect accuracy [0].
`mpv movie.mp4` and boom - you're watching the video with no cruft. Not rebuilding font database and other bullshit you don't care about. It runs really well on older hardware.
I paste a Youtube link into one of the hundreds of Google results for "Youtube downloader" and I get a bunch of clear Google video download links in various formats.
I paste a URL into "PWN Youtube" and I get this (buried in a mass of other text I don't care about, hard selling me to spam the site on FB/Twitter/Friends):
Download this video as FLV or MP4 files
Use one of: Peggo | Telecharger(warning) | SaveFrom
9xbuddy(warning) | File2HD (?) | Dirpy(warning)
If I have to jump through another hoop of visiting some other dodgy website - some literally have warnings next to them (!) - to eventually get a download link, what's the point of "PWN Youtube"? Why don't I just use the dodgy sites directly (or, even easier, use their bookmarklets)?
> This website is not affiliated with YouTube.com "YouTube" is a copyright of YouTube, LLC.
Probably shouldn't be using the word/trademark in its domain name then.
Im uh... not sure what you are on about with the red and download bit. Im a youtube red subscriber, and I can download videos for offline viewing in the youtube app. It also indicates that I am a red subscriber in it.
I think he's referring to the fact that Youtube Red is not available in every country yet.
I think each of these address a very different problem, and completely disagree with him. Trying to bundle all of these things into one big app will just make the app bloated and development painful. Youtube at this point has many different uses (average length videos, live streams, music/audio) and trying to have a one size fits all app is not necessarily the right way to go.
Youtube GO is meant for people who live in areas with poor connectivity. Again, having them download a big 100mb bloated app is not the right solution. On the other hand, people with LTE don't care about the download size and locally sharing videos, so why put that in the same app? Same thing with trying to put Chatting/Livestream notification into the Youtube app, or trying to hack a music player into it.
And none of these apps allow me to speed up video lectures (1.25x, 1.5x, 2x).
Plus, the "main" YouTube app still insists on displaying a small video with tons of crap around it, so that I have to hunt for the tiny and easy to miss "full-screen" button. I clicked on the video to, you know, watch video, not read the captions under thumbnails from all the other videos YouTube thinks I might want to watch.
You also forgot the YouTube kids app, which provides no way to filter it more granular than the expected age target so if you downloaded it to let your kids watch a certain show it doesn't matter they'll be on unboxing videos, hacked pirate content, and weird homemade animations in no time.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Apple doesn't provide anything like YouTube. If they did, they would have similar issues - there are all sorts of legal and business constraints associated with that kind of service.
A more appropriate comparison would be comparing the iTunes movie and TV store with Google's equivalent (Google Play Movies & TV):
* Both have movie purchases in over 100 countries. Apple has TV purchases in 6 countries [1]. Google has them in 8 [2]
* Both allow offline download of purchased videos. Google also allows downloading purchases to SD cards (less relevant for Apple).
* Google has a web-based player for purchased videos. Apple doesn't, AFAIK.
* Apple has carrier billing in 6 countries [3]. Google has it in 45 [4]. Google also allows you to use PayPal in a number of countries.
Hopefully this will actually work in all countries; I'd love to save videos for offline viewing while I have a wifi connection and watch them later when I don't. But that would compete with "YouTube Red".
For that matter, since an offline video eliminates the buffering problem, I'd love to have the "playback speed" feature in the mobile app. The web version of YouTube supports changing the playback speed to 1.25x, 1.5x, or 2x, but the mobile version doesn't.
Looks promising. Doesn't seem to support subscriptions, though, which is the problem every unofficial YouTube app seems to have. Probably because logging in and accessing subscriptions requires the API, which has a ToS.
Yeah, the XBMC Youtube addon used to do subscriptions and the like, it was pretty nice, but I think it broke and the main developer abandoned it. Youtube-dl does support channels and resuming though so you could fairly easily just set up a cron job and use syncthing to get the videos onto your phone. No pretty GUI for that though.
I personally use an RSS Reader to handle my "subscriptions".
The YouTube-webpage also has an option to export your subscriptions to an OPML-file (which can then be imported into an RSS Reader): Log into your YouTube-account, then go to "Manage Subscriptions", and then at the bottom of that page, there's a button for it.
(This is how it worked a few months ago. I actually don't have a YouTube-account anymore, so I can't check if it still works like that.)
On Android, I personally use SpaRSS [0] with it, which does work quite well, but it being available on F-Droid was pretty much essential to me, so if you don't care about FLOSS, you might be able to find an RSS Reader which integrates even better with this setup...
By installing a custom ROM without also installing GApps. For example, I have a Nexus 6P running CopperheadOS, which doesn't include GApps (it, like CyanogenMod, supposedly supports it but makes it optional/separate from the OS itself).
There is also this app [1] (shameless plug, I wrote it) which uses youtube-dl to download videos off any supported sites. No real UI as it just parses the media URL (when a link is shared to it) and passes it off to the android download manager.
I threw it together (over a few hours) simply because I like watching stuff on youtube at 1.5x speed and the android app does not allow you to do it (whereas if you use VLC to play the downloaded video, you can increaseplayback speed)
It's also available on the play store [2] with youtube downloads disabled by default
I just tried NewPipe. However, after downloading a video, you can no longer play it directly in NewPipe (with NewPipe's ability to play in the background), only in an external player.
I tend to use youtube-dl to grab what I want while at my laptop and sync to my phone so that I have things to watch while about. Not a perfect solution, but works for me for now.
As I mentioned in the other [1] thread, you can use this android app [2] (which uses youtube-dl) to download directly onto your phone. If you're on iOS, sorry :(
An HNer posted this, his creation (https://videocyborg.com), in the past month. September happens to be a month where I had to endure a slow home connection most of the time so, when in the odd cafe, it was nice to have the service so I could watch videos later (at home).
I use youtube-dl as well, though I don't sync that to my phone. I need to set up a more automatic mechanism to sync files to my phone when my phone and laptop are on the same network or in the same vicinity.
Self promotion, but I recently wrote an iOS app that allows you to download YouTube videos for offline use and play them in the background. Unfortunately not on the App Store, but you can still put it on your device through Xcode.
Saving videos sounds awesome until you have that feature (Amazon video app has it for instance). You never think about saving stuff when the connection is good, and when you think about it, it is because the connection just went horrible and you are not able to stream or save anything anymore.
Google still doesn't know what it's doing with YouTube. As a longtime consumer of YouTube videos, and somebody who is actually inside of the YouTube community, I understand that. The "Advertiser Friendly" policy was universally mocked for being absurd, and it is. Then there's the indication that it was behind the inexplicable monetization drops on major channels a few months back. The YouTube team has been seen to do some good stuff as well, like the Community tab, but if they want to keep the communities they've built, and the near monopoly on online video they have, they need to get out of their ivory tower, and actually understand that when they make decisions they have real effects on the monetary income of real people, and that when they change their algorithm or site design, people actually go out of business.
However, at least in this case, they're taking a step in the right direction, no matter how small.
The policy wasn't universally mocked. Maybe you're in some specific subcommunity, but browse around a little. The opinion I heard most was that the policy is understandable (there is such a thing as advertiser-unfriendly content) but people want more transparency from YouTube so they can work the system effectively.
That's true, but the point that many made (and is correct) is that many forms of content cannot be advertised upon under the new policy. In fact, depending upon how YouTube interprets the policy, they can probably block monetization on any video they want, and still claim to be merely enforcing the policy. Finally, it's quite unlikely that this policy will be implemented fairly. If you want evidence, merely know that one of the most viewed videos on YouTube is Nicky Minaj's "Anaconda," which is rife with policy violations, but is on a VEVO channel, and thus technically published by part of YouTube itself.
Do you think they'll be blocking monetization on that?
No, it's not evidence, but until serious enforcing happens, it's the best I can do, and I think it's a reasonable assumption to make.
Search for rap song Coco. It's about being love with cocaine and violence and it shows me Kia car ads with families before the video. And some semi amateur authors who TALKED about true crime events were banned from the YouTube adsense partnership.
I don't see that as inconsistent. The term is 'advertiser friendly'. Plenty of advertisers are happy to be associated with popular artists because their popularity gives the advertiser cover. Equally, they might not want to be associated with a small-time true crime channel.
The term is not really advertiser friendly. Adsense (also YouTube) TOS makes it very clear ALL the content needs to be family friendly to begin with. Of course, I understand big labels are given an exception but it doesn't make it less hypocritical.
Why is it hypocritical to cut a deal with certain important clients? Even Stallman recommends selling license exceptions to GPL'd code.
Generally speaking, any startup on this site will give preferential treatment to a $50,000/month customer than to a $5/month customer.
Even your bank will treat you differently if you want to open an account with a deposit of $2 million than if you want to deposit $25.
I don't think "hypocritical" is the right word, since Youtube isn't making a moral judgment. They'd take any money they could if their partners would let them.
I understand how world and business work, no problem.
I just lined out this is the reason they claim for banning those YT accounts from revenue. I have personally no problem understanding it, but it doesn't make it any less hypocritical.
The same with Google best the practices on showing content first, ads after, same time their search is covered with ads and the content is below fold.
This is a direct avenue for advertisers to control what content is actually available on YouTube. If you want to make money on YouTube you need to make content that advertisers like first and foremost or you get to make no money at all. It's exactly the control they had during the television era. Smells like weak reason as a guise to gain control over the content presented on the site entirely.
That's always been true, it's just now moreso. This is why creators of content that is offensive (The Jimquisition), niche (Longer videos from people like CGPGrey), or that just want less strings attached are flocking en masse to direct sponsorship (a very old idea, common in the podcasting world, and perhaps most famously enacted by Rhett and Link), or more often to a donation/membership model à la NPR (typically through Vessel or Patreon, this is most successfully done by Crash Course, a show that has a massive budget and is largely payed for by viewers), or to other websites and networks (NormalBoots, HiddenBlock, Channel Awesome (formerly TGWTG) - anywhere that can get other advertisers, or pay the bills somehow).
If I use Google display network to show my ads, there is no category to exclude videos promoting violence and gang life. There is no way I can exclude that specific video.
What do they gain from removing advertising from any video? Any money you make is money they make.
Another thing you need to realize is that this is all automated, they don't come and manually remove monetization from your video. Yes, the algorithm could potentially be wonky, but again, it's in their best interest for it to be good.
Everything that has been spouted so far has been senseless propaganda and none of it is backed by any actual facts.
They would gain more advertisers paying them money to advertise with them.
Yes, it's automated, but there's some degree of oversight. Once again, there's no way they didn't realize that videos uploaded by one of their departments violated their monetization agreements.
And it's not senseless propaganda. It's already starting to happen, or is likely to happen.
Have you been paying attention to the YouTube scene? Like, at all?
Advertisers will pay them more money if they can be confident their adverts won't be placed on videos where they would negatively impact the advertiser's brand.
So you're telling me that this probably significant percentage of Youtube creators whose videos fully adhere to the rules and have never had any problems could potentially gain a lot more money for their hard work if these few rare cases decides to clean up their videos a bit to follow rules that have been there for years and that they've agreed to when signing up?
Sounds like a fantastic deal to me, and I don't see why all those other creators should be punished just so that a few can gain money making content that is against the stated rules.
And again, this isn't censorship, if that content is really important to you, it will still be there for everyone to see, just not monetized.
This time, you make a valid point, although I'm still not sure if you really understand the landscape.
The problem is, it's more than just a few rare cases: everyone from VEVO, to tiny channels, to the biggest channels on youtube, have been breaking these rules for years. And even if they don't think they have been, you can probably find violating content somewhere on the channel if you look hard enough, because the new rules are pretty broad. And the fact that the rules aren't being enforced equally makes it all the more BS, even if it's YouTube's prerogative to do so anyways.
Honestly they could have just left youtube alone, let it generate ad revenue in return for hosting videos, and that's it. No need for youtube red, youtube go, "advertiser friendly" crap. Just keep running youtube and use that revenue to fund other projects.
Apparently, Google disagrees. YouTube hosts a massive amount of video, so they may be right.
I actually don't think YouTube Red was necessarily a bad idea: People get to skip ads, and play videos offline/with their phone locked. We use that money to pay creators and fund premium content.
To counter, if you want to support the creators, it's better to subscribe via Vessel or Patreon that it is to get a YouTube Red subscription...
I've heard a few times already that Google isn't actually making a revenue off of YouTube and rather just paying to keep it alive. No idea, if that's true, though. There's also the consideration that having a YouTube-account gets you into the whole Google-ecosystem, so might actually pay off on other ends.
Still doesn't explain, though, why they keep making such bad investments...
I'm amazed they had to go all the way to India to figure this out. But I'm often amazed at how little Google understand "social." The cynical side of me wonders if their misunderstanding is all intentional.
As much as this sounds like something I would personally be very interested in, I can't help but think it doesn't fit into Google's ideal of how customers use their products. Rather I get the impression they're pursuing this begrudgingly just as a way to get into the Indian market; the announcement is notably non-committal about it ever being rolled out in the US.
I'd buy this in a heartbeat if I could. No big hopes that it will come soon where I live though - google is just not hungry like Netflix and co it seems.
But no list view for music. Because when I'm on a tiny mobile screen I want to see over 3/4 of my artist list covered in album thumbnails that I don't recognize and half the text cut off because grid view is the hot new thing.
Still, hard to beat the value and the mood-based radio stations are awesome.
you are right on. This is google-version of the facebook PR fiasco with free internet.
They will never sell youtube RED to that market. RED is only for the san francisco bubble, where everyone already pay $100 overall for streaming services (hulu, netflix, pandora, spotify, etc, etc).
But for those other markets, they actually still rely on eyeballs and ads. And on those markets, they have to open a few concessions to actually get the eyeballs.
I've also found the offline use in Google Maps to be horribly unreliable. I had Google Maps set up with an offline map and, two times in a row, when I wanted to actually use it, the offline map had disappeared from my phone for whatever reason.
This was a good while ago, so I don't know, if it's still the case. All I know is that I switched to OsmAnd~, set that up once and since then always reliably had a map in my pocket.
This should be made available every where. But then they can't charge us for offline and background play.
YT would get more views actually if they allowed offline now. It would also help with the puny data allowances wireless carriers are imposing these days. The offline will take the power away (in a small way), from the carriers.
They can provide the same experience as today, ads and all. People can watch YT on flights, while driving and what not. Amazon video allows offline usage today and been for a while.
"While in Nagpur, I met a young man who loved using YouTube to watch WWE wrestling and wanted to show us his favorite video. But after he found it and tapped to play, the video just wouldn’t load"
I believe this is really bad example, as WWE is a "premium content" so you have to pay extra to watch it. Therefore Youtube removes those videos (there is only 2 WWE videos which is from legal accounts).
So it's pretty awkward example just as "the young man in Nagpur wants to watch Game of Thrones with his HBO Go membership but he can't because of he is poor internet connection."
This also struck me. I was surprised that they picked WWE of all things, you would think that video would be region locked and thus not available outside of the US, like a lot of things are.
I'm in India. I searched "wwe". Tons of videos. No evidence of region blocking or as another person said "premium content". Have a look: http://imgur.com/8xgmnDq
Maybe they are premium content in US but free here.
I think that pretty much is just the reflection of the fact that Google never properly cared to bring their products outside of US. A lot of even their free services are region locked for no good reason (which is kind of opposed to Apple for example, who rarely region locks their services).
Perhaps them using that specific example was an attempt to court Mr. McMahon into opening licensing negotiations, by demonstrating the profitability of a specific target demographic that is watching pirated content anyways.
Yes, but Google is exceptionally good at fragmentation and confusion in regards to products. How many gmail apps do they have? Inbox, gmail, android mail (though this got deprecated), web interface, etc. Youtube now has 2 apps, a web interface.
They seem to like to make new stuff, rather then upgrade their existing stuff. Then every second year they just go through their stack and deprecate 30% of it.
> Inbox, gmail, android mail (though this got deprecated)
Don't forget the cleanest, best-performing one: the classic "Basic HTML" interface. Which manages to be much faster for most operations than Inbox or the AJAXified normal version despited having to reload the whole page.
You just have to love that classic approach to web development, right?
JavaScript is great for improving the user experience, but it's often vastly overused and just makes me scream for simpler times such as the classic web app.
I'm increasingly convinced that much better solutions to most of the problems Javascript and AJAX solve ("solve") would have been better frames and improved HTML forms.
Exactly! I use Bootstrap for the auto-scaling to the device, and AlpacaJS for the dynamically generated and adjustable forms... but that's it. That's all I want from JS: form management and validation, and responsive design (and I believe the latter is done in pure CSS anyway?)
YouTube Creator Studio of course is a different app for managing your channel - which is great - I think it's a fantastic separation of concerns. One app for consuming, another for moderation/management.
But then yes, you've got:
* YouTube (proper)
* YouTube Kids
* YouTube Music
* YouTube Gaming
* YouTube GO
While I agree fragmentation can be bad, YouTube is one area where I think this makes sense. What a gamer wants in an app is going to be very different to what someone seeking educational content is going to want.
Similarly, a kids app is very useful given how many kids are growing up using cheap tablets to stream videos, and I know from watching my nephews that the way they use YouTube is very different from how I use it.
> I don't understand why a new app if this could just be an additional feature in the current app.
Its a ground-up rewrite of the app with a very different experience focus and for a different audience. It wouldn't make much sense as a feature of the existing app.
Because the UX focus is different, the assumed technical infrastructure context is different, and, well, basically everything except the backend service consumed is different. Youtube Go is more distinct in role from the core Youtube app than the other break out apps (which mostly are distinguished by content focus on UX tweaks around the focal content) like Youtube Kids, Youtube Music, and Youtube Gaming.
I guess we have to agree to disagree. I don't think adding a button or two is some fundamental change that requires 10 meetings with 2 designers and 5 developers. They're already streaming the video data, just save it to a file in addition/option to rendering it. They can already play video data, just play it from the file instead of streaming it.
There's probably a lot more changes than you realize. I can only assume given your comments you've never worked on problems like this. There's so many benefits you can get from writing an app specifically for low-end Android devices with poor data connectivity.
>There's probably a lot more changes than you realize.
Do you know what those are or did you just assume that because its Google and so "there must be reason"?
> I can only assume given your comments you've never worked on problems like this.
You may assume it. The alternative explanation is I don't think its all that hard because its not all that hard.
> There's so many benefits you can get from writing an app specifically for low-end Android devices with poor data connectivity.
IMO, all that should be part of the base app. If your app can't handle different workloads (especially as basic as intermittent network connectivity for a video streaming application), its pretty much a huge design fail there.
I get the impression you haven't tried to refactor a large code base to change core functionality before. Any system architecture is built with, inevitably, certain assumptions on how the data is going to come through the app and where it's going to come from. Something as low-level as the source of video files in an app that is no doubt optimized for that is undoubtedly a fundamental change, and one that is going to be easier to fork and rewrite than try to shoehorn into existing code.
Your impression notwithstanding, the fact is that dozens of applications already exist that can play network streams, play files from your hdd, and even record streams to your hard disk (VLC for one), means that its a known solved problem. If, as you say, a video streaming app, at its core, cannot handle something so basic as saving the stream to disk, or playing the video from disk, then I would count that as a major design failure.
Also I don't get where the "undoubtedly", "fundamental change", "going to be easier to X" comes from. What is your basis for those statements?
In my opinion, default offline vs default online is a HUGE architectural difference. You could probably try to hack it into the existing player, but it wouldn't work well.
A ground-up rewrite wouldn't surprise me at all for such a change.
From the screenshots, it looks to be trivial functionality that could be baked into the existing app. Besides the ability to download and play files is not something I consider to be a "HUGE" architectural change.
It’s a step in the right direction supporting offline first, encouraging to see this.
But I’m also a little disappointed it’s a separate app, and country specific from what I can determine. It would be great to see this rolled into the current app without restriction.
IMO, that's because YouTube Go is an app with experimental features. They're not sure whether these features make complete sense for adding all of them blindly to YouTube app itself.
Grr... Is google seeking praise for slightly loosening the shackles?
This "YouTube Go" MIGHT be a media player. It MIGHT operate on files. It MIGHT be possible to share a video via some mechanism other than bluetooth.
The other day I was trying to convince to a user that she should want to own her content, rather than rent it... when I suddenly realized that he doesn't know what a file is. Moreover, he doesn't realize what it is good for...
Once you have a (DRM free) file, it's yours. You physically possess it. That means you can copy it, share it, back it up, print it, pipe the raw ones and zeros to your PC speaker, whatever. The next generation might not get that...
The fact of the matter is that until I was college-aged, nobody taught me more about computers than Microsoft did. I read every .txt file and .hlp file that existed on my C:\ drive. Not to mention the physical manuals... Then I went on to Linux, etc.
So I KNOW what a file is. You and I can have a conversation about mtimes. We can rattle off a list of traits that each file must possess to BE a file.
What the heck is Google teaching this next generation?
Owning is just so much less convenient than renting access. I vastly prefer the experience of using Spotify and Netflix to the experience of maintaining my own music and media collections.
While I agree, renting access often comes with the trade-off of losing control of your content. Netflix's content licensing agreements are finite, and your favorite movie or show could be gone next week. When you own the files, you own them for however long you desire.
True, there are always tradeoffs. This particular tradeoff doesn't bother me because I can always get a copy of a particular file if I need to, e.g. if Netflix pulls down a show I like.
For music at least, you can get the best of both worlds with Google Music. Any songs you purchase, you own. You can download them, back them up, migrate them to a different service, whatever. For songs you don't own, you can still stream them and save them offline as long as you're subscribed.
I understand that people have different priorities, but as others already mentioned licensing deals end and you might find yourself without access to countless favorite albums at some point, despite having paid Spotify & Co. for years. And that's not even discussing the huge amount of obscure, leftfield music and rare stuff that won't be available on any streaming platform, ever. For me, as a music enthusiast and collector, the selection on streaming platforms is way too limited.
The same applies to films and shows - there the situation is even worse. Netflix selection is very, very poor and of course they know it, which explains the heavy focus on original and exclusive content.
When I kvetch about this kind of thing, my wife likes to remind me: it's everything.
It's hard to find a can opener that will last a long time. Food is made as cheaply as possible. Movies are carefully crafted to maximize profit, not to tell stories. Advertisements lie.
If you deconstruct it all down as far as you can go, you land on money. Well, I do. She says its "human nature". Whatever that is.
>But even as they discover the joys of YouTube, their experience is not great on slower connections and less powerful mobile phone ..
Or on fast connections but with data caps. So outside of wifi, Youtube is unusable. I'll watch two-three videos and I'll hit my monthly cap.
Almost every single issue India users experience is a problem everywhere else. Every solution they came up with would be useful for users everywhere else. It feels like Google engineers live in the SV bubble where unlimited always-on connectivity is a fact of life. So thanks Google.
There is a setting in the YouTube app to only play in SD when not on WiFi but that may only be on Android. It's still not nearly as fine grained as it should be.
I would love the ability to leave a video playing on my phone when I turn the screen off. I often will listen to a song but as soon as the app minimizes or the phone goes to sleep mode, it stops.
This is a Youtube Red feature. Not sure why it isn't part of core Youtube (perhaps its related to not being able to show ads to users with the screen off?).
Good question, one that probably has less to do with what Google wants, and what the music industry requires. If you turn off the screen, the "video" is indistinguishable from an audio stream. So they want to track for terms of royalties paid per "listen".
This is only feasible on a subscription basis (no one has a good microtransaction model with actual payments) and so Google and the music industry limited the feature to only subscription based.
But since Google owns the Android platform, they could make YouTube track usage even when it's off-screen (paused Android activity), right? Heck, that may even be feasible without special privileges. Not sure about iOS though.
I mean, if I can minimize a tab running YouTube on my PC, I don't see why I can't do that on my phone.
Because why should it be? People are willing to pay for it.
This is especially also the case, as Google could abuse some sentence in the YouTube API ToS, which prohibits the separation of audio and video, to get rid of third-party YouTube apps which offered this functionality for free before YouTube Red became a thing. If those had been around, they couldn't really have charged money for it.
There are still a few of those apps available on non-Play-Store-stores, as Google would have had to deal with legal entities to get rid of those (and would have probably lost), but most people never use alternative stores, so that's not really a problem for Google.
Maybe it has something to do with them not being able to show you ads when you video ads when your screen is minimized. Or maybe it is to prevent people from using youtube as an alternative to paying for google music.
Regardless, I posted my original comment because it seems a bit disingenuous to say that this feature isn't available when it is (at least in the US). You just have to pay for it.
You can do that with safari on iOS if tou don't have the YouTube app installed. It works with any mp4 or mp3 stream too. And you can use other apps, browse other apps or lock the phone and have the controls on the lock screen.
Let it play, minimize the video, switch tab or app or whatever, pull up the bottom controls and click play.
Of course it depends on where you live. Even in europe you'll find lots of underserved areas once you'll leave the cities. No provider is interested in building the network in these regions.
Holy shit you guys, some people actually use our apps from devices lacking an always-on connection! This is the revolution that will give rise to Web 4.0 -- apps that can work without the internet! It'll be the biggest thing since the recent development of Web pages that automatically reconfigure to fit different screen sizes!
> But even as they discover the joys of YouTube, their experience is not great on slower connections and less powerful mobile phones.
Why not just make this the norm? Websites do not need to be 6 MB per page (and that's with an adblocker). Google is one of the worst offenders when it comes to website bloat, including their once-famously incredibly simple search page which is now jam packed with tons of features, both requested and the majority not requested by anyone.
The notion that an HTML 5 web page requires so much extra fluff to accomplish something as simple as streaming video with recommended links and a comments section is maddening.
Just because some of us have bigger, faster phones with more bandwidth doesn't mean you need to make things more complicated.
So can I finally delete the fortune app from my phone? I think this forced installation of tens of useless Google apps on android is horrible. I don't use their crappy services and I should be able to delete their apps from my phone. And I don't want to root because that invalidates knox in my phone, which I need for office stuff.
I'm excited to use this new app but the older one should be deletable.
The "Fortune" app? As you mention knox, I assume this is an app that Samsung force installs on your phone; so I don't really see what Google can do (without locking Android down even more, and I'd rather they didn't).
Google is mostly going in the opposite direction and allowing you to uninstall any apps you don't use [1] -- admittedly, the Youtube app is not one of them on my 6P. But, I can disable it so it's not visible in the app drawer. In fact I can disable all the google apps and have always been able to do so (the only exceptions are non-Google, "system" apps).
Doesn't help if you buy a Samsung phone though....
well it would be cool if i could tag a bunch of videos to be viewed offline in the app.
I have a music list on youtube and sometimes i have for example a political debate that is an hour long, it would be cool if i could just tap on it in youtube to make it offline viewable instead of going through the massive hassle of downloading it somehow, transferring it to the phone etc and then maybe i dont want to watch it anyway..
I want to know who or what will decide what to put in the preview. Will content creators have any control over this? If previews are strictly algorithmic, will there be recourse in case a certain preview misrepresents or spoils the content?
It is in Hindi. A literal translation would be something like "blow your fun, not your data", where the first "blow" means "expand", and the second "blow" is the traditional "explode" or "destroy".
Thanks. I'm from India and I speak Tamil. It is eldritch when people use Hindi as representative of the whole country. Hindi, along with English, may be an official language - but more than half the population do not speak it!
since long time ago I could download youtube for offline watching already so what's new here, I tried two minutes to read this article and gave up, I wish it pinpoints what youtube-go really is and give me the answer in 144 words.
This article is about rethinking and developing a new youtube app with "offline first" in mind. It was created after researching how YouTube is consumed in India to offer a more user friendly experience.
My comparison was criticizing (as a YouTube Creator myself) the focus YouTube had in recent years regarding innovation of the platform itself.
YouTube heavily focused on things like: 360° videos, Offline (mentioned in the article), interface, comments, trends.
There is 0 innovation from a creator perspective. Platforms like Snapchat make it insanely (!!!) easy to create content on a regular basis. Sure the Snapchat platform is not at all as full-fledged as YouTube but I think it is dangerously close for quite some (YouTube)genres like Vlogging and could easily be extended.
EDIT to elaborate on Snapchat (for user @lucb1e): Snapchat is per se not interesting for a content-creator with a big following just to send self-destructing messages.
They introduced a feature called „Stories“ a while ago which let's you take multiple clips during the day and then combines them to a „story“. Within 24 hours the viewer/subscriber can play your story and see your whole day.
So you basically have a full video without ever touching Adobe-Premiere or Final-Cut. Importing, editing, exporting, uploading even for the most basic videos on YouTube takes (a lot of) time.
From an analytics perspective you can check views, screenshots, etc of each individual story-element and interact with the viewers (e.g. screenshot to vote for an option).
Oddly enough, the billion-plus, relatively-well-educated, developing nation your CEO happens to have been born in might find itself a slightly corporate emphasis.
From a user perspective, the purpose of YouTube is to play out videos. Time spent in YouTube's user interface is a means for getting to the videos. But from Google's perspective, the revenue comes from time in the user interface, where the ads are.
No, that is just my knowledge from using YouTube and my experience with ad trafficking. YouTube's ad revenue comes from the videos you see when you watch YouTube videos, not from the ads around the website or in the UI of the mobile app. Do the current mobile apps even have ads in the UI? I don't think they do.
The point I'm trying to make is that YouTube Go offers a significantly different UX that seems to be about making YouTube more accessible on slower connections. Your speculation about ads in the UI is baseless, IMO.
> Do the current mobile apps even have ads in the UI?
I don't know if they're paid for, but the "you should watch this" and "follow that" and "omg this is so hip in your region right now" are driving me crazy.
> Did you even read about any of the features here?
This was referring to the fact that the main features that the article discussed were about previewing videos and peer to peer video sharing, which are tangible UX improvements that have nothing to do with showing the user more ads.
Stop projecting how you treat your users with how other people do.
Being able to download at different quality, being able to preview, and being able to share over Bluetooth are just straight up usability improvements for people in the targeted region (and probably elsewhere too).
In case you didn't read the article, it's actually an interesting dive into what it takes to improve the user experience of youtube in places with poor bandwidth. It's really worth a read, and while you're correct that youtube makes it's money from ads that's actually commensurate with YouTube Go's goal of improving the user experience and bringing it before hundreds of millions of additional eyeballs.
It's kind of obvious that for pretty much any ad supported service good user experience is in direct conflict with revenue. But I think this is not about that. It looks more like a PR piece combined with an attempt to reach more people.
Great to see Google splintering off into single duty compartments instead of spreading itself so thin that nothing gets done with the same amount of focus. Alphabet was a true design decision, and a mature one at that. One thing that crossed my mind recently was the notion of Google and its long relationship with hardware: we have this thing called the Blockchain now, and it could do with some of Google's hardware to run on, instead of independent factions of people spending their pocket money on their own hardware. It kind of makes me jealous and annoyed that so much could be spent for what effectively is sometimes just a data center for storing people's holiday snaps on Google Plus, when it could be used to host micro democracies and change the direction of finance. I suspect all that hardware will eventually be re-purposed many times throughout the course of the Google experiment and probably will eventually be given away at some point to the blockchainers who need it. I can picture the scene: dreadlocked decentralists rejoicing at their new hardware gift from Google, 25+ years from now. The ultimate redemption from their years of slavishly handing their personal information over to Google in exchange for a decent search experience. A true revenge for consumers of Google. Meanwhile Google would have entirely switched to SSDs and are probably using post-quantum chips, but at least we can host multiple different blockchains now without spending our pocket money on them. The blockchainers can start to get rich and blockchain can really flourish. Also, Google needs to create services which are for a post Snowden world. Allo is cute, but entirely inferior to things like Signal which addresses the problem of encrypted private chat head on. Google needs to create things like its own VPN service, perhaps?
So I wonder, will I perhaps be able to watch talks and other videos on an airplane now using YouTube Go? Which subset of functionality will work on this soon-to-be-abandoned app? Does it even address any of the issues that content creators, Google and us users have with the platform?