Note how the author in detailing their 6-year journey only focuses on their customers without any care for the actual end-users that have to engage with these tools in their final form.
Current situation around ad-blocking is just symptom of the problem. Users try to extract value from the website they are presented with and websites try to hook users into their platform without chance to leave.
The good thing it is only software
Guess whether their reader base has increased or decreased from their heydays.
Most newspapers or magazines have reduced or stopped their print editions.
Subscription model works only for niche audience, willing to pay for the premium content and premium experience. Rest of the audience will not pay a penny - they are okay to use the site if it is free but with ads, and many users will use some adblocker, but if site refuses to show content if it detects adblocker, they will simply go elsewhere rather than paying for a subscription.
Newspapers had willing subscribers especially since they had few alternatives. Their subscriber base was not niche at all.
These newspapers were also heavily subsidized by not only advertisements but paid classified ads.
You either caught the local/evening news on TV or subscribed to a small handful of locally delivered papers. Maybe they also deliver major national newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The willingness to subscribe didn’t go away, the problem is that alternatives quickly arrived that didn’t cost any money.
Free online classifieds ate the newspaper cash cow. People are often still willing to pay for the services that newspapers provided: just see eBay, Autotrader, and Craigslist. The problem is that your local paper can’t match the product that the internet makes available.
The main incentive to have these custom controls I see is anti adblocking
You're not asking for the OS native widget though, you're asking for Apple's native OS widget to support that. The problem is that makes it up to Apple to lift a finger to support it. And Apple does whatever it wants. Sometimes those things are aligned with you as a user, sometimes not. And yes, showing ads is one reason some parties have for this. The other large one though, is codec support. If you're not in the game, codec support seems like such an inconsequential detail that it can't possibly be the real issue, but with money on the line, it's a bigger deal than you'd thing.
The thing is, unless you get in the weeds, the codec support is paid for when you buy the hardware. You don't have to deal with it. But when you're not Mr. Beast, showing videos on the big platforms, you aren't making giant piles of money. Thus, you need to optimize smaller details to make smaller amounts of money.
Which codec is being used becomes material because you can save money there with encoding and you can save money with content delivery as well. It's just about money. So it's not (just) about ad blocking money; it's about content creation and distribution costs.
- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.
- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.
- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.
- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.
Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.
How do I seek to the exact first frame of a timestamp with mux? I've tried a few things but it seems to always go to the nearest keyframe rather than the first frame at e.g. 00:34. This is sensible default behaviour but bad for my use case.
Some developments in this space over the past few years have been the ability to interact with the actual frames of video being rendered and to output those into a canvas tag. This is under the Web Codecs API.
For a while I was working on a video review tool for eSports teams which required the ability to have frame perfect annotations. I got around the inability to perfectly pause on the same frame by using screenshots of the video which were overlayed over the video but with the codecs API, you don't actually need this. It opens up all sorts of features like being able to play videos backwards for example.
Check out the Omakase player: https://player.byomakase.org/
