YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started

> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything

And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.

So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.

It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.

This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.

Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing.

But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).

I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.

Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option.

All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.

This is a good point.

I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.

Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.

Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.

> probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again

Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park

Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)

Why so much?

Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.

And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.

So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.

Am I doing it wrong?

> digital purchasing

That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy

The fundamental way how youtube content is organised is channels. You find a few channels you like, you watch their back catalogue and you subscribe to their new content.

And it is indeed a business layer too. The people making the channel gets paid for their trouble per views. Each channel is a little brand with their own idea of what kind of content they will give to the viewers and in what shape and what kind of quality.

I’m sure what you describe is different from this in some way, but it is weird reading that you wish youtube had channels without mentioning that it already has them.

> because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.

Idk if you are pickier than me, or have even more niche tastes than I do, because in my experience youtube is full of great content.

Conspiracy theories nowadays are about a year away from being conspiracy fact. Digital ID is being HEAVILY pushed by the Labour government in the UK. Scary times.

I don't understand, why isn't Youtube social yet. By that I mean why can't I subscribe to other recommendations by creator of the channel Posy or Martijn Doolaard or Sisyphus 55.

Google is planning to connect vidgen to YouTube.

Expect a full-on slop tsunami, with people running bots that first generate half facts and outright hallucinations from Gemini, and then generate a visual tutorial for it to post to YouTube.

"For the DIYer, a tutorial on strengthening beams. Step 1: rub glue on them."

It's true... but such an awful double edged sword.

I have quite a bit of experience as an auto mechanic, and love using youtube to find footage of something I'm considering doing or some item I'm considering buying. Just the effort+time savings alone is a game changer. Previously I would download FSMs for something I was considering acquiring to see what it's really like to work on / maintain / something of the internals, to minimize risk of buyer's remorse.

However, most the videos I find of people DIYing things are utter trash when it comes to actual guidance. The readily available footage of internals and failure modes is super valuable, but most these videos will do more harm than good when actually listened to. It's a whole lot of the blind leading the deaf. And the youtubers generally speak authoritatively about things they're clearly doing incorrectly to anyone experienced.

We had the same problem in the web forums era, but the conveniently accessible instructional video format strikes me as far more problematic. At least in the web forums it was entirely a conversational text format, so you were already in the context of reading comments, and the discussion would usually call out idiots immediately front and center. In the youtube videos, especially viewed on mobile, the comments are something you must seek out past the ads, must mode switch from watching tv to reading something, and are usually filled with morons anyways.

Google figured out how to get all those creators to work for free, to put a nice coat of paint on their fascism Trojan horse. It's a tool of oppression, masquerading as a tool of expression.

> just have to deal with live reads

Sponsorblock takes care of >95% of those.

Sponsor block is much less useful now Premium subscriptions have the "skip commonly skipped section" feature, which is always the sponsored content. With the addition of this, you can avoid ads and sponsors well enough now on Premium for me.

I was pleasantly surprised YouTube came out with a first party tool to skip sponcon.

> https://dataconomy.com/2025/07/30/youtubes-ai-powered-jump-a...

I don't understand why you wouldn't just get yt premium. You get the same features and it pays out well. YouTube premium views are like gold nuggets for creators.

So I'm watching a thing on youtube. 5 minutes in I get a commercial.

SmartTube can seamlessly delete that commercial?