I honestly wouldn’t mind paying for it if it didn’t feel like such a fucking rip-off.
For example, for £19 a month I could sub to Netflix top tier. For that, I and three others could watch their stuff in UHD, all at the same time. And sure, Netflix content might be somewhat average these days, but it’s still reasonably high quality and costs a decent packet to produce.
By contrast, YT Premium for family is £20 a month, with which I can access a bunch of videos that, while enjoyable, do not cost Google anything to make. Yes, hosting costs money, and yes, they (theoretically) pay the video creators. But it doesn’t feel like £20 a month, y’know?
Part of the trouble is that they lump YT Music in to the same subscription. But I don’t want or need that. I have Apple Music with its lossless catalogue, and library that I’ve built up over many years. If YT offered a straight up ad-free plan that I could share with my family that cost a tenner a month, I’d probably go for it. It would mean being able to watch videos on Apple TV without having to fuck about downloading them to my Plex folder first, because they’ve injected SO MANY ADVERTS in now that the YT app is completely unusable.
wackoCamel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I have a hot take. I pretty much exclusively watch YouTube as my form of TV entertainment. On most days, I watch many hours between putting something on to go to sleep or actually watching stuff in the day such as training courses or whatever. Sure, I could easily set up my TVs and devices to work around it, but I think it’s actually worth it to just pay for Premium and not have the hassle. I feel I get more than my fair share out of it.
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
What I’m not ok with YouTube premium :
The price is too high for a subscription. For that price I could get thousands of movies on a competing service like Netflix.
Even if you tzkr YouTube premium they are still farming your data and selling it to third parties.
So even if I watch a ton of YT I refuse to pay to sell my data.
If I pay for YT they have to not track me and not sell my data (at least data coming from YT).
So yeah taking YT is hassle free but is quite the scam if you think avout it. Before paying you were the product. After paying you are still the product but on top of that you give them money.
FishFace@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The big data-farmers like Google aren’t selling it to third parties. It’s worth far more if kept to themselves and used to build an ad platform.
SaltySalamander@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
It'd be real nice if people would actually use their brains and realize this.
TonyOstrich@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Your second point is specifically the reason I don’t pay for Premium. I would actually really like to but unless there is some kind of guarantee they won’t be double dipping, I’m not going to.
wackoCamel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think the price is a far better deal than Netflix. Even when I had Netflix, basically all I watched was Breaking Bad. Shows I like or want to view now just live on my media server. It came to a point I couldn’t find anything interesting to watch and cancelled it. I don’t remember the last time I watched an actual movie. There is so much more than I’ll ever have the time to watch on Youtube. If they want to use what I watch to attempt to show me ads I’m very likely never going to see elsewhere, I honestly don’t care. They are going to try to show me ads which will almost certainly get blocked, anyway. I’m not watching anything on Youtube I wouldn’t mind telling anyone about anyway.
I don’t feel scammed, and it impacts my day-to-day life in no ways aside from saving me time having to fiddle with my network for 30 minutes every time an actual video won’t load because I’m trying to block a 30-second ad at the router.
Netflix also sells data to 3rd party marketing services.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
As long as people are actually willing to get scammed (and boy did the threshold get low in the last decades), scammers will scam.
sunbeam60@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Same here. I’ve cancelled Netflix, never got Disney plus, never use prime (though I think I have access to something through prime shipping).
YouTube however; I watch this every single day, use it for learning, relaxation, documentaries etc.
It’s a fantastic platform and well worth the subscription AFAICS.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, and let’s not forget that as good portion of that premium sub goes directly to content creators
stsquad@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I’m similar - and my kids even more so. As they only watch YouTube on the main TV it’s a pain to get alternate frontends on it I also like the fact there are no ads. I think the creators get a bigger cut per premium view Vs ad views, especially if they get blocked.