Which, I get it, YouTube isn't paying them enough and they gotta eat. So, it kind of feels like YouTube letting them post their own ads is an intentional choice on YouTube's part to not give me the service I'm paying for.
Good services will not get pirated.
Literally all those services have piracy problems, and pretty much any time piracy drops it's because of more effective DRM, not service.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
Music purchased on iTunes used to come with DRM. There were programs to get rid of it but they got shut down by Apple and were not easily accessible. Consumers pushed back on DRM and Apple eventually got rid of it.
Rather than leading to widespread piracy, most people just started renting their music from Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
They seem to be the only ones who get how piracy can be fought. And its no secret either, gabe newell has that "piracy is a service issue" quote for anyone to read. Its just that these companies dont want to consider not squeezing the life out of their users for shareholder benefit
Ill say again what gabe newell said. Piracy isnt a price problem, but a service issue. Its convenient, if you can make a legit way to get the product thats as convenient for the user as piracy, then they will pay for it
This is how you describe a glorified VCR?
Also the videos are free either way. It's true that people are avoiding paying for an ad removing feature, but installing your own software to get features is pretty reasonable.
And ad removal is well established as a feature people use and it being fine that they do so.
Edit: Take me, for instance. I can tolerate ads, much as I hate them - waiting 15 seconds and hitting "skip" twice isn't going to kill me. But good christ do I not like YT's UI/UX.
There are important use cases for these tools outside of "free stuff".
But yeah, why not also attach our payment information to our watch history to make it even more efficient for Google to keep on what it's doing right now?
