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With so many talented people with their own channels, youtube surpassed the value of "network television" long ago. Whether free or premium, it's a fantastic value.

I can easily see traditional network television becoming extinct within 20 years.
 
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Oof. I guess this is what I get for not getting the annual plan when I was thinking about it a few days ago. I thought $11.99 was expensive already which is why I keep buying it and pausing it.
 
With so many talented people with their own channels, youtube surpassed the value of "network television" long ago. Whether free or premium, it's a fantastic value.
Indeed. I often question how cable and satellite networks like Discovery still exist, as the quality of work is phenomenal on many channels. In fact, I don't remember the last time I put Discovery on. I think when I did, I had some garbage "Gold Rush" nonsense on there. There is nothing good on those channels anymore.
 
Is the annual plan available in the UK? Can never seem to find it. Am I right in thinking I have to unsub and start a new plan? Typical Google, their help pages send you in circles. But not Google Circles. Lets not talk about that.

Long time subscriber btw. I probably get more value from it than any other sub I have.
 
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Indeed. I often question how cable and satellite networks like Discovery still exist, as the quality of work is phenomenal on many channels. In fact, I don't remember the last time I put Discovery on. I think when I did, I had some garbage "Gold Rush" nonsense on there. There is nothing good on those channels anymore.
Agree, And a lot of the folks who worked on the Discovery Channel and other network shows have their own channels on Youtube. The Myth Busters guy has a great channel. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And the great thing about YouTube, a lot of the channels are very timely, whereas anything on network feels stale and past its expiration date.
 
Wish they would release an ad free YouTube only plan, even something that was like 100 ad free videos for $2.99 would be good for me.
 
I find YouTube Premium to be a great value.

I’m not a billionaire but am upper-middle class (~$700M personal assets) and I find it totally worth the price.

So much entertainment and education there to access and the experience is just much better without ads.

Highly recommend even at the new price.

Education on YouTube? Please people don't learn anything off YouTube cause in 10 tutorials or whatever only 1 is right on the money. YouTube is full of noobs and yunguns who just watched some other YT video and then went on and made their. Most likely the video they watched was wrong to begin with and since the foundation is wrong all the twists they added to their own video makes it even more wrong.

Perfect example: Resolve video editing and color grading tutorials - 90% of them are all wrong when it comes to theory and intermediate workflow. Only the basics are covered properly but then again that's what official Manual is for. Let's not even talk about Fusion compositing and all the crap that's been populating YouTube for last two years.

But one that takes the cake are "music production" tutorials. You wanna learn production? Go to school. Period. When it comes to music (especially electronic/techno/trance/main) there is only ONE serious video tutorial publisher on web right now that is legit.
 
With so many talented people with their own channels, youtube surpassed the value of "network television" long ago. Whether free or premium, it's a fantastic value.
I agree. It's easy to fall into thinking, bah YouTube nonsense, but show discernment, stay away from hot button issues, and it's tremendous. I love how documentary-like content, from good creators, is completely free of the endless filler that you find on broadcast tv. Sometimes I have to skip back because I missed something, whereas on TV you know they will tell you everything 3 or 4 times, followed by irrelevant talking heads telling you how they "feel" about said info zzzzz.
 
Youtubers that have egos and continue crying about how they’re the victims of issues and people etc. Japan here we have some pretty terrible Youtubers that are always clamoring for attention and I’ll do anything for it some of the biggest names in YouTube personnel are always in the news for the wrong reasons. is a total joke and how they all are allowed to do what they’re doing in sorbent egos. There are some really good YouTubers. But YouTube themselves cause they’re Personal ego so extreme when they give them rewards for being what 10 million viewers 5 million viewers 1 million viewers that’s when it gets to these egomaniacs. to rewards these maniacs and what it creates is more of a mental capacity of being even better than the next Youtubers if that’s even to create fake accounts to make their user base look bigger. It’s bad enough that we have to be submerged with this crap but the pay for movies it’s just the icing on the cake is how bad this platform has become. The one I’m posting a photo of is the most notorious for claiming as a victim. He’s always in the news you’re always reading about them in your in Japan. He has a net worth of ¥19 million at least and he has over dozens of major sponsors. this is how bad our personal lives have become that sponsors knowingly know that YouTube is a valid source for advertisement. The source of this image is Softbank mobile.
 

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I never have much of a problem with YouTube ads. I tend to watch it on my TV and the ads are the same as broadcast media. We don’t get them during big livestreams (eg E3 or Apple) and I’m happy to watch them to support my favourite creators. They get more from sponsorships anyway but still.

Their music offering is as bad as Spotify. Big gaps in the library and no way of buying albums to directly support your favourite artists. The iTunes Store is still important.
 
In some ways (not all ways, corporate greed also plays a part) this is just a byproduct of our own self-entitlement, a monster of our own creation. We expect to get so much for free nowadays as far as online content is concerned and yet we forget that all the backend services have to be paid for... so they put in ads to pay for them... and we block them with ad blockers... so they have to put in more unskippable, mid-roll ads... and we block them... so they have to charge a subscriptions, and we hack it or share passwords.... so they have to put the prices up...etc etc etc...

The developers, the machine room leasing, the server costs, the maintenance costs, the upgrade costs, the electricity costs, all the people performing these tasks... this all has to get paid... and every year everyone wants a pay rise.

Yet we still think we should be given this stuff for free and resent having to watch a few adverts in order to pay for it?

I'm not a YouTube Premium subscriber. I don't even have a Google account (deleted many years ago).

I agree with you. Running a service like YouTube costs a huge amount of money. The majority of users don't understand how expensive is to manage it.

And I'm not only talking about viewers. Content creators too often miss this important point. If all of those more or less silly youtubers out there had to cover the costs by themselves (running a mini personal YouTube-like website, so to speak), only a small portion would survive. Anyone else will disappear within a few weeks.

Yet sometimes they dare to complain too. Granted, they create contents, and often make an investment in order to produce the videos (audio/video stuff, editing software, lighting, ...). Still, Google provides them for free storage, CDN, player, apps, comments, live streaming, chat, thumbnails, captions, analytics, maintenance developers, etc.

The CDN part alone takes a tremendous amount of money.

Basically it's the only big video service on the market. For good reason: economically is almost impossible to deal with. Any other alternative (paid or free) either didn't succeed or is covering a niche segment in comparison.

To some extent Google is even generous and kind: every ad is pre-announced. They could inject ads in the stream without giving the ad-blockers the possibility to block them in advance if they wanted. Maybe only an AI-powered ad-blocker could remove the ads with a little pre-buffering to analyze and spot the ads in almost real time.

The same goes for social media. All those servers running day and night cost a lot of money. People should start to keep in mind this aspect and whine less.

Don't get me wrong: I don't like ads either. I pay for services if I consider them useful, though, because I know that otherwise it's an unsustainable practice.
 
Long gone are the early ”Wild West” days of tech and the internet. Everything has been commoditized and priced accordingly. There are no more competitive advantages of having internet and consumer electronics. Everyone has technology and much has become commoditized necessity. Tech is no longer a our friend it is simply big business and as time goes on businesses will get wiser in figuring out ways to make maximum profits from consumers.

Amazon Prime, Streaming services, software subscriptions, artificially created paywalls all add up. We are probably worse off at this rate. We escaped cable tv, old wired phone companies, physical media, and many other traditional services. Heck TV and Radio were at least free in yesteryear when all of it was transmitted over antenna. In the end though we are and will be paying more than we have in the past. Yes we will be spending thousands of dollars per year per person on digital subscriptions and services going forward. Add those expenses to the cost of having to upgrade/replace hardware, the cost of internet connectivity itself and we have more of a curse than a blessing.

As much as I love technology sometimes I yearn for those simpler times before much of it existed. The early years were exciting and great. I am getting old…. I remember having dial up internet in high school while the vast amount of the population had no internet at all. I remember being one of the first among friends and acquaintances to get high speed cable/DSL internet. I remember my first iPod and iPhone, both of which were so Alien to 95%+ of the population. My first iPhone 3G was literally like a piece of the future that fell out of the sky. No Android back then the next best thing was a BlackBerry which is now so ancient in hindsight.

Oh well…. We can only move in one direction, forward we go for better or worse…. Oh yeah, Slack, Zoom, Google meets and a bunch of other things while cool at first have become sources of great angst.
 
Glad I joined the defunct Google Play All Access (now YouTube Premium) for $7.99/mo way back in the day. Lucky to be grandfathered in, and hope Google doesn’t stop that.
 
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Lucky for me then I buy it from wherever in the world I find the cheapest......as I cant abide adverts on my LG TV when watching RyuSMM.. Im sure this last years was india for about 9 quid for the year :)
 
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Glad I joined the defunct Google Play All Access (now YouTube Premium) for $7.99/mo way back in the day. Lucky to be grandfathered in, and hope Google doesn’t stop that.
I'm sure it will stop. If Netflix and Reddit have taught us anything it's that people will piss and moan but after the dust settles and the consumer realizes there's no alternative they'll either pay the price or stop using it all together and if the latter then the company doesn't care about you regardless.

If YT just fixed their plan and added different tiers instead of this "all or none" approach then folks would be more forgiving. YT didn't do anything to prevent people from using an adblocker and instead doubled down so they just alienated their current customer base...good job YT.
 
So within last couple of months of price hikes, my family and I decided to axe Max, and we’re on the verge of axing Netflix. This leaves us with Disney+, youtube premium and tv+.

Subscription services were new, and no one knew how inelastic their pricing was at the start. At some point, people started cutting one service in favor of another, and that’s how the streaming services will slow the hikes.

Speak with your wallet, folks!
 
I'm sure it will stop. If Netflix and Reddit have taught us anything it's that people will piss and moan but after the dust settles and the consumer realizes there's no alternative they'll either pay the price or stop using it all together and if the latter then the company doesn't care about you regardless.
Funnily enough, YouTube would actually have the strongest position (compared to the streaming companies) since the content people watch on YouTube isn’t typically available anywhere else, except maybe patreon, and pretty much none of it ends up on the high seas. Unlike Netflix where it’s easy to turn back to torrents like we used to do
 
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