Youtube stop doing this because people would pause a Multi-Hour long video (such as a music video) download the entire thing, only to then only watch 15 minutes of it because that's the bit they wanted. Massive waste of bandwidth
What do you mean “waste of bandwidth”? We’re paying for that through government subsidies and selling our personal data. Are you seriously defending a corporation that made $250 billion last year in ad revenue alone?
People hate corporations so much that they forget some times they do make smart choices. That bandwidth doesn't just exist from nothing, it's electricity being moved around. The environmental impact, even as infinitesimal as it may be, isn't worth the convenience imo
People stitch together what is essentially a play list of music videos because YouTube's actual playlist feature kinda sucks. Has something to do with longer videos, engagement and ad revenue too but I'm not privy to that Eldritch knowledge.
Lots of people just need filler music while doing something for several hours, yt playlists are ass, picking a new song every 2-9 minites is quite disruptive, and any form of autoplay will eventually dump you in alt-right politics.
You've never seen a Video DJ mix before? They can go on for several hours and have more than just 3 songs—usually a dozen or more—all mixed seamlessly into one continuous mix with no gaps between songs. And if the person who made the mix is a real DJ, the songs are also BPM- and Key-matched with each other, which sounds absolutely amazing when done right. It's one of the better ways to enjoy music.
Billion dollar costs aren't rounding errors even at YouTube/Google's scale. They're a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it's hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It's especially hard to justify when there's an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.
What's going on with YouTube video downloading? Any route I take to try to download, it only gives me the option of 1080p video only and a different option for audio only. I've recently downloaded a couple of videos my kids watch for offline use and I had to put the downloaded files into a video editor to combine the audio and video myself.
If you ever find yourself combining audio and video again, check out mkvtoolnix. In this situation, a video editor is overkill and potentially transcodes the audio or video, taking an hour. This tool is basically winzip for video files, it lets you swap audio and video tracks around in a few seconds.
The amount of times my video brings unplayable even though it has a few minutes buffered is too damn high. Almost all the times my video gets stuck, is that scenario. Not to say it happens all the time.