YouTube even offers a Creative Commons feature, such as on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o: if you scroll to the end of the description it reads: License
Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).
I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal.
Sure, Google could do but there's more than enough problems vs reward to make it unattractive:
- When you fast forward VHS tapes you still see the adverts. When you time seek a digital video file you don't.
- It's harder to do targeted advertising (since you no longer know if the downloader is also the viewer)
- Adverts baked into a video file can't be changed out later for newer adverts after the user has downloaded the file
- There's no way of having users "click" those adverts, let alone report back to Google that they've engaged with it
- Some of those aforementioned points might also have a knock on effect with how advertising is charged, which would mean Google would need another pricing model
...and all of this is before you even address the technical issues of video files having multiple different bitrates and formats. You could probably generate a new file on the fly but that would be extremely computationally expensive. So they'd rack up more costs hosting the service as well as lose money on advertising.
Honestly, I can't blame Google for not supporting a download option.
What do you mean by "technical issues"? Google already has a streaming video player supporting multiple bitrates and formats. They could just do whatever youtube-dl does to pack it into a file or even more optimally, grab it from their video database directly should there be something like that.
I'd already explained the problem, albeit without much detail.
The adverts are a different file to the video files. So you need to either merge them ahead of time or dynamically splice them in real time.
Ahead of time: Now you need to not only have a video asset for each bit rate and video format but you need to multiply that with the number of adverts on any given day. This would result in thousands of files, maybe even hundreds of thousands once you take targeted adverts into account. And they'd need to rebuild their entire catalogue whenever an ad campaign ends. Clearly that isn't going to work long term.
Real time: Option 2 is to stream the advert then follow immediately with the video content on the same HLS stream. This is much more achievable than option 1 but you are then running the streams like a live TV service where you're dynamically splicing content into existing streams. It isn't difficult to do per stream but it is extra processing compared with the existing set up. The real problem lies with scale. A TV broadcaster might do this with a dozen to a few hundred channels, each with contracts ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Youtube have millions of streams, each which earn pennies from advertising (and even less if they had to download because of the change in advertising model -- as I also described before). So they'd have to pay more and earn less. The financials simply wouldn't stack up.
Before you comment that YouTube and Twitch offer live streaming services based around the same advertising models, yes they do, but they also operate using the same stack as the pre-recorded videos because those video streams don't need to be spliced by YouTube / Twitch (any editing happens by the content creators before it hits YouTube and YouTube can show the adverts before or even between the videos by injecting them in the browser (ie so the splicing is managed at the front end rather than on Googles servers). None of this is doable with a "download video" button.
Exactly, Google has that player, but to replicate the same effect for offline playing you would need to play a playlist or a DASH video and multiple fragments.
But I grant it's technically possible to do with a single MPEG file, just not trivial. You would need to prepend the advertisement to the video bitstream (re-encoded with same parameters such as width, height, FPS, intra picture interval) and then do the same for audio, while ensuring the video/audio synchronization is kept intact (MPEG edit lists are not well-supported by players, such as by ffmpeg), while preferably not re-encoding the actual video. A bit more complicated to do the insertion in the middle of the file.
It's possible to do, but I don't think it's something that any off-the-shelf tools actually do.
Yeah there are off the shelf tools available to the broadcasting industry. But these things are designed to tens of streams, not millions. As usual, it's a scale problem rather than a code problem.
Not directly, perhaps, but the Law of Large Numbers says that views-per-download are very probably statistically derterminable, and can be estimated with high accuracy.
Otherwise, this is the same problem print newspapers have; how many readers per copy, seeing what adverts, how many times? This can be modelled or assessed (e.g., by reader response codes / instrumented URLs) fairly readily.
Last time I was messing around with youtube-dl I was surprised by the huge size and variety of formats for just one video. I can’t think of an easy way to constantly embed new ads into all those video files. And can they charge for an impression without knowing if the video was ever watched? Maybe its just too much trouble.
Make it part of the Premium subscription then (which is ad-free). If people or companies have a legitimate use for downloading videos, paying $10/mo (or however much it is) isn't going to break the bank.
Google has zero interest in free downloads. They are in bed with the music industry which makes them some ad dollars and their client thinking is sub-zero. Thats because the public is not the client, the advertisers are. If I worked at Google I would be scratching myself behind the ears and take a long big look at what the company has become.
I suspect there's at least a small dose of ultra privilege of googlers involved too.
The same way governments and bureaucrats fuck up things like Covid responses, because they can't even imagine people not having 9-5 office jobs which are totally suited to WFH, and then blithely implement disease protection schemes failing to account for low income and precariously employed people, many of whom are working 3 jobs to pay the bills (including stuff like cleaning jobs where they work at 4 or 5 different old people's homes) - and then wonder why outbreaks spread so fast.
Googlers have probably forgotten the olden times, when they didn't have Gigabit connections to their pockets and lounge rooms, and don't even remember last time they wanted to "save a copy into a hard drive locally, like a hilarious boomer!"...
But I lived in Mountain View. Decent internet is more or less not available there. Your choices are comcast or DSL.
Maybe they just don't remember the last time they had a waking hour out of the office ... :)
It's clear to me that whomever is making these product decisions has a very different relationship with computing and their data than I do-- but whatever the reason is, I don't think it's because they have a much better internet connection.
Youtube makes money on advertising. You can’t put modern ads into a downloaded video. I don’t think the ultra-privilege of Googlers factors into this particular decision.
(Also if you live in Mountain View, you’re stuck with a Comcast cable modem and a 38mbps max upload speed even when paying for their “gigabit” plan. But you'll only get 10-15mbps during the peak hours of the work day.)
The copy-protection MAFIAA (a joke acronym, Movie and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical super-beast merger of the vicious & loathed RIAA and the MPAA) spent a while going after BitTorrent itself too, in a similar manner, as a potential tool for piracy.
Thankfully plenty of people were also using BitTorrent for things like distributing Linux distributions & creative commons material.
I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal.
Likewise for public domain videos.