Google warns users of these apps that their experience may deteriorate soon. They may “experience buffering issues” or see errors such as “the following content is not available on this app” when trying to watch videos.
Similar to Google Search, ads have become insufferable for many users of the service. There are too many of them, they may break the viewing experience, and they may show inappropriate content.
YouTube Premium is expensive. What weights more for some users is that its functionality is severely limited when compared to third-party apps.
The cat and mouse game continues.
For those looking to avoid ads or improve privacy, here are some options for free, open source, privacy-friendly frontends to YouTube without advertisements:
If the streaming apps will be deteriorated the only option left will be yt-dlp and mpv left
as long as the content is publicly available they cannot block yt-dlp, buffer at best.
I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point they start doing something like what Twitter did and require login to view the content.
I think yt-dlp lets you use your login credentials?
Yes. The thing is that then you are no longer anonymously using yt-dlp.
The next step would be trying to detect that case… maybe adding captchas when there’s even a slight suspicion.
Perhaps even to the point of banning users (and then I hope you did not rely on the same account for gmail or others).
It’ll be a cat and mouse situation. Similar as it happened with Twitter, there are also third party apps, but many gave up.
Yup, it has a
--cookiesflag to either use an exported cookies file from your browser, or if using Firefox just tell it and it’ll grab it automagically.They might but if they do they’ll lose a huge revenue because a lot of website have Youtube videos embedded. Imagine you have to login to view an embedded video. Even website owners won’t like that because their videos won’t load automatically and they will start to seek alternative options. So I don’t think Google would take that risk soon.
It may not be too bad for users: a lot of people are simply always logged on, so they’ll not see any difference. What is the current share of Chrome?