How to kill YouTube in one stupid step.
I guess their CEO wasn't paying attention when the music industry got trounced by pirating.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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DRM
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Why would it kill YouTube?
Spotify has DRM for all of their songs, it has not killed music streaming.
What this actually does is make it formally illegal to rip YouTube videos (circumventing DRM is against DMCA). It's also a shot against youtube-dlp, which refuses to cross the line of cracking the DRM, which would be doable, but they don't want to on account of the legal issue.
How exactly will this kill YouTube? This will only kill ad blockers.
Nah, maybe some people will switch ad blockers off, but for most, the msin takeaway will be to look for a competing service.
You vastly overestimate people's tech savviness.
And you vastly underestimate the value Youtube would lose if the tech-savvy segment of their audience went elsewhere.
Those left behind are a different market. Youtube creators would have to dumb themselves down even further, driving even more worthwhile content off the service. Soon Youtube would be the Facebook of video sites, geared towards a shrinking population of people too old and stubborn to move on.
I say YT should absolutely shoot themselves in the foot like this.
If they were to force a TEE based DRM like Widevine L1, it would likely cause significant issues as there are a considerable amount of devices that don't support it (for example most PCs).
If they were to use software based DRM like Widevine L3, it would be easy for enthusiasts to crack and the tools for doing so would just get much much better.
Probably not going to kill it, but the number of users and view counts will drop dramatically. The idea is, that it cuts all deadweight users, which reduces Google’s expenses.
Everyone who is allergic to ads, will leave and find their video entertainment elsewhere. As far as those users are concerned, YT will be dead to them.
Those who remain, will either pay up, or have ads shoved down their throats. Line goes up, and shareholders are happy. The money must flow.
As the enshittification of YT has marched towards its terminal stage, many youtubers have already prepared for it by migrating their videos to other platforms. YT doesn’t like tits, so those videos had to go to Onlyfans, Justforfans or whatever. YT doesn’t like guns, so those videos went to Pepperbox. YT doesn’t like providing a steady income to anyone, so many videos went to Nebula. Then there’s also palces like Floatplane, Locals, Playeur etc. I’m sure there are lots of other video platforms too. The way I see it, YT can die, and the fragmented video landscape will only thrive as a result.
Sure, but I still think yall are really overestimating how many people will actually care. You might need to reevaluate your bias. The average person will definitely not change apps or websites. Maybe 1% of users will care to find an alternative for their video needs. And even then, some videos are only on YouTube.
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Probably explains my looping 403 errors on SmartTube, but it eventually loads after several attempts.
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Widevine L3 is trivial to decrypt at this point, there are even APIs on the web to decrypt it. Playready SL2000 is starting to get much easier to decrypt as well.
Forcing TEE based DRM (Widevine L1 and playready SL3000) would have the potential to cause too much collateral damage. They would almost certainly have to have exceptions some devices. If they intentionally break compatibility on browsers other than chrome, they would probably face antitrust issues.
So it is likely there will always either be a way to bypass or decrypt.
More than ever, people need to start using alternatives. I recommend Odysee. It has a couple issues that they're apparently working on but it's easily the best overall alternative.
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I've been thinking about using Nebula. Does anyone has any experience with it?
Its got some great creators, Ive been on there a couple of years. Only downside which some might be glad to be rid of is a lack of comments, and feedback. Without any interaction you're just watching videos; doesn't feel like a community or conversation.
Seems a shame because there are creators who appear to value the voice of the community on a platform where their audience has no voice.
There's a thread from five years ago where a founder Dave Wiskus said they had plans for a thread-like comments section. So it's weird; must not align with whatever else it is they're doing.
I'd say the same thing about dropout TV. How can we get in the comments without a comments section!?
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Wonderful service. Nice, educative sometimes, and entertaining videos. Mixes well with grayjay/my other subscriptions on youtube/odysee.
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Its a shame that content creators don't truly own the content on YouTube and can simply opt out of DRM on their videos.
Also weird timing considering boycotting is a common topic right now.
This is fine. I actually encourage this. Let the market decide whether it likes this.
The issue is that hosting costs for videos are insane. There's nowhere else to turn except for Youtube (unfortunately PeerTube is so far off being a reasonable alternative). I would love to see some more competition, but I don't see it happening in the close future. The sad state of things is that 90% of the population won't care if their favorite MrBeast video has DRM.
Maybe entertainment YouTubers should get together and do what Nebula did for educational content. I'd sign up for that, if it had channels I care about onboard. If YouTub decides to hide behind a poop-filled moat, I sure won't be swimming to get there.
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The sad state of things is that 90% of the population won't care if their favorite MrBeast video has DRM.
Agreed!!
(unfortunately PeerTube is so far off being a reasonable alternative)
Why? Because of the hosting cost? Where is Youtube getting this for cheap?
I mean, I could see PeerTube being an alternative if there was better discoverability, better tools for creators to monetize their work, and there was a huge influx of people moving over to PeerTube as well as starting their own instances in order to spread out the hosting and make it less expensive for everyone involved. YouTube isn't getting it for cheap, they're just financed by one of the world's largest companies and have huge amounts of revenue.
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Because of the hosting cost? Where is Youtube getting this for cheap?
More than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute (reference). The cost of operating this system is astronomical. Building a competing platform is entirely out of reach unless you have nation-state levels of wealth.
YouTube's costs are effectively subsidized by Alphabet (Google). All of the restrictions being implemented are about trying to make YouTube profitable, especially by protecting the ad revenue stream.
That's why they been forcing more and more aggressive ads, and In order to drive up revenue more ad reach, they allow significant amount of right wing content to become more prevelant.
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That's why I encourage YouTube taking ever more extreme steps to extract their user's worth. If they just take it far enough, there is a chance actual competition might show up.
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They have been attacking adblocks for the last 10 years, unless they do what twitch does, they aren't stopping it.
The more unusable/unbearable they make YouTube, the sooner users will start looking into alternatives.
I quit twitch exclusively because of the ads
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This kills the YouTube. Maybe not quickly, but it will be a large nail in the coffin should they double down on it.
In a way this enshittificication is necessary to make the replacement possible. Whatever it will be.
I pay for Premium and if they actually do this I'll stop my subscription. Web DRM is stupid and I hate that other Streaming Services already have it. Apart from being another resource sink in browsers, it'll stop third party clients which I use and it also turns off Nvidia Shadowplay which is annoying as it doesn't automatically turn back on once the DRM content is no longer loaded.
Google is also experimenting with my not using YouTube any more.
Funny enough they used to use their own video playback codec which had to be cracked in order for downloaders to work, so technically they've been doing DRM for a long long time.
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