this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Because Google chokes the market. There could be plenty of other competitors if Google charged for it like other companies would. Google subsidized YouTube with the rest of their company's profits, not to provide us a free platform because they're so nice, but to prevent competition. As long as YouTube was free, no other companies would be able to keep up with the costs, therefore no one else would enter the market.
If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.
If google "charged for it like other companies would" then youtube would not exist. The ONLY companies that can handle that volume of data are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft: The three big cloud service providers. And Microsoft noped the fuck out and Amazon have some strong purges on most streams.
And... there were other sites that tried to compete with youtube. Those of us who are old enough will remember subscribing to Rooster Teeth or Giant Bomb but watching the videos on youtube because "the site player is shit". Let alone all the general purpose video sites that either became dirtier than a truck stop lizard who barebacks constantly or became liveleak and was all about Faces of Death and revenge porn... and then went out of business.
Videos is INCREDIBLY expensive. That is why the current rise of sites like Nebula and Gun Jesus's site and Corridor Crew's site all paywall watching anything. Because free video would cost way too much.
So... you actively dislike a model where you can choose to watch videos in exchange for watching an ad and instead insist upon paying to watch anything. AND still don't want to pay to watch anything because Youtube Premium lets you do that anyway.
The Giant Bomb site player specifically was way better than the contemporary Youtube player for a good long while. They were also better at prioritizing bitrate over resolution, since they weren't obsessed with pretending they had a pixel count advantage over competitors while compressing contents down to mush. If anything it's ironic that Youtube will now try to sell you bitrate as part of their subscription without cranking up the resolution, presumably because their creators no longer even try to upload 4K anymore.
Sorry, now I'm bringing up legacy gripes from a different decade. Carry on.