There's little difference between enabling a single screen shot and allowing screen recording. The rights owners require blocking of screen recording, so all screen capture gets blocked as a result.
If you could opt-out of Google ads and just be distributed/indexed by YouTube, then you'd be paying for hosting/delivery/indexing. Given that the economies of scale are spread among many users, the bigger streamers who this would benefit would then make the platform worse for everyone else.
Youtube is spreading the burden of carrying all that content, from utter crap that no one watches, deep archive and onwards to Mr Beast, etc. There's a huge volume of content that Google hosts that's costing more than it earns them.
Your comment I think drives my point even further. No content creator is paying for YT, neither is any end user[0]. So in this theoretical world where YT is separate from Google, now YT has to possibly pay Google for storage and one way to subsidize that would be to deduct it from creator's adsense revenue and/or limit the free content one can post in some way, like plans with different tiers of GB.
In some ways in this theoretical world, the small/new upcoming creators would have a larger chasm to cross into profitability if they move from a free plan into a paid hosting/delivery plan before becoming profitable. Unless a small/new creator gets massive quickly or goes viral they will have a much longer time before adsense can fund the storage. This might mean that the nonsense content goes away because churning out volumes of content to have more "surface area" for people to discover a channel can't be profitable.
[0] There may be premium content subscription options where some users pay a creator but I would imagine that is a minority of creators.
It's also important to recognise that content providers and CDNs adding private peering or hosting within ISPs doesn't diminish public peering. It actually frees up capacity on other transit routes.
ISPs don't QoS some companies to give them better service, the only difference is that in-demand companies tend to invest in capacity in partnership with ISPs. But ultimately, in most cases those investing generally use the same capacity that everyone else can use. The only company who doesn't resell their CDN capacity is Netflix. The others, Google and Amazon, dog food their own products. If you want to use the same systems as Prime or Google Video then you absolutely can. Other streaming providers use public CDN capacity just like anyone else.
Does YouTube get a favourable rate for capacity over other users? Yes and no. If Google doesn't charge YouTube then it's losing profit on the compute to sustain YT. But YT still has to make a profit and YT carries the cost burden of a great deal of legacy crap that a new entrant wouldn't. What Google has built is a miracle of engineering, to be able to get videos from relative nobodies to the other side of the in the world within minutes, at relatively high quality. While also allowing millions of kids to watch someone play Minecraft.
I respect what they've built. Would it be good to have diversity? In some ways yes, but in other ways choice sucks. Fragmentation of places to view content is something that gets increasingly complained about in the streaming world.
Is YouTube greedy? I don't think so. Building and maintaining what they've built is hard. As everyone else whose tried it knows. Just riding on their coat tails and leaching on their servers isn't sustainable. Ad blocking and saying Google deserves it isn't sustainable. In the extreme, if we burned down Google and said we wanted that model to end, the world would be a poorer place for it IMHO.
Context: 24 years in media, a decade in streaming for big companies, no affiliation with Google.
Yes, I agree... But it's even more complicated, because peering exchanges are only available in meaningful numbers in Europe and some countries around it. Also paths can be QoSed depending on many parameters, costs and deals.
We built a software that optimized routing based on cost depending on the 95th percentile usage, channel quality and some other parameters.
In Asia, South America (really shitty place for internet infra) and North America the conditions are different.
But Youtube did indeed built a great CDN, coupled with control of the end user video player made the best video on demand platform by far.
It's also worth noting that in most cases on-net caches (in ISPs) aren't as common as people think. It's mostly private peering at public data centres. Google doesn't have servers in all ISPs, this was more common in the past than today.
For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to pad out the offering. Then it depends on the deal, but often the amount that each item is watched then contributes to the royalties cost. The relative exclusivity you might want will then dictate the overall cost and royalties returned.
For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.
Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.
A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality.
Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.
Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.
All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
I'm a senior person who looks after content protection and anti-piracy at a major streaming company.
The idealism of those who want to see the demise of DRM doesn't actually hold up in the face of reality. Even when we remove restrictions and give global access to content, for free, pirates don't give up. One of the reasons is that many pirate sites get ad revenue, piracy is a business for many folk and they get the benefit of not paying for the most expensive part. They also don't have legal/regulatory compliance, taxes and will often operate their infrastructure using stolen credit cards or accounts (we can see this).
Then you have people who are selling legitimately and trying to provide the best service for customers, but who have to pay for the content, competing with people who don't have any such responsibilities. So, customers take the cheap deal.
Some folk are also under the assumption that streaming services are money grabbing. Except when you actually look, most streaming services are running at a loss, or barely profitable.
I'm just working to protect our company and reduce losses, ultimately I am not preventing people getting access to fresh food or water. I am protecting premium goods from being illegitimately exploited and protecting the jobs of my colleagues when we're already under significant cost pressures.
One reason I post about these things on the internet is in the hope that one day we might have a constructive dialogue about how to balance freedoms AND enable commerce. But at the moment we have extremism, libertarian ideals against company lawyers.
I'm sure you are aware that there are groups (scenes) which break your DRM as a hobby, they sacrifice device keys for 4K HDR content. And they do it for just the reputation.
More money than ever flows into piracy these days.
Even with complete monolithic control (which is an unlikely objective) over the entire chain from distribution to display there will be a way to obtain good quality output from a hijacked LCD controller if nothing else. There is no win condition for you.
Yup, and I have zero issue with people finding exploits, ultimately many of those just serve to help us improve security as they get released.
Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as possible to take content without paying. No security system is going to be perfect, but when you make it secure enough that people concentrate on weaker targets (or give up), then you're content.
The biggest problem with this is that DRM does not work, there will always be mediums such as blu-ray releases, some chinese display controller or l3 data decryption available.
By that measure, locks on our houses don't work, so we shouldn't bother locking the door? To repeat what I said to the other commentor:
Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as possible to take content without paying. No security system is going to be perfect, but when you make it secure enough that people concentrate on weaker targets (or give up), then you're content.
I've already been using HaLow for years to link my in-laws house to our holiday cottage. I get ~14Mbps which is enough for my wife and I to work remotely for a few days.
I purchased a cheap "CCTV wireless bridge" from AliExpress and it works fine. Sure, I could be paranoid about the security, but honestly these devices are dumb and the goats in that village aren't astute at hacking obscure wireless signals.
I'm using it at less than 1km, but that's because we're on a mountain and there's lots of trees that I have to cut through. I've previously tried 5GHz Ubiquiti gear but there's a particularly big tree I can't get through. I swapped out the omni-antenna for some UHF directional antennas to make it more selective.
Looks like this product is just a reference design for their silicon, I can't see anywhere you can actually buy it.
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