YouTube could play ads and let me play videos while my phone screen is locked. They could play ads like they used to: a small popup. They could play ads like they did after that: one 5 second pre-roll. Or like after that, a pre-roll with a skip call to action.

But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15 second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because they're making educational content, often for kids and schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" / "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are consistently small bugs in the user experience of the app.

Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the people who own the operating system, browser, app store, and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus my email and my productivity software, all of which they will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own everything.

So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror show out there, they promised they'd be good and they cannot stop getting worse.

At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month for the privilege.

It's colloquial knowledge at this point that companies suck as much from consumers as possible, just look at the "inflation" narrative. Company had to raise prices due to "supply chain constraints/inflation" but then goes on to report record revenue. To an extent it's just supply and demand, and I want to respect that, but most of these same companies got government handouts from PPP while the everyday consumer has to choose between one $10/month subscription service or another. Fuck. How about charge me money, don't put in ads, but charge enough that you make money, it's just not hand-over-fist because you've created a monopoly?

I don't like this reasoning because I've seen the inside of google. Their bandwidth is very cheap.

What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.

But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.

The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.

Key words are "would cost _you_". The providers get much better cost per GB at scale, then sell to you at a profit.

For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at just 150TB, including the AWS markup.

(Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable to S3 data out!)

> Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.

No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.

The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.

If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.

Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.

The big cloud providers all charge ridiculous amounts for their bandwidth. It makes your numbers completely invalid for any bandwidth-focused operation.

Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.

Not to distract from your point, but

> It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.

Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.

Though Cloudflare does have a separate product for streaming Video, it definitely doesn’t fall under the generic CDN serving files model

Yes, I get that I have to pay a lot for bandwidth. And that you have to pay a lot for bandwidth.

My question is specifically about YouTube.

This looks to me like a sane comment. No idea why this was downvoted.