It's hilarious watching all the corporate apologists claiming stuff didn't exist before corporations came in and stole all the credit for work they didn't do in the first place.
Honestly, I'm ok with at least giving channel ad reads a shot. Those aren't based on my watch history/search history and the channel owner actually gets a good cut. Almost nobody can make a living with google ads.
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now....
The day they go 100% paywalled, is the day their dominance ends. They will never do this because, contrary to the corporate dickriders in this thread they rely on bait and switch tactics to draw the crowd in the first place.
Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn't work. It's not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?
You're right. But then it's also their cost incurred. Their decryption keys to revoke on exploited devices, and their engineers to try and come up with a software patch for their hardware-level CDM. It's costly was my point.