I find this the height of arrogance that Google charges for this and it enrages me on a level I freely admit is irrational and pointless.
But just the gall:
1. Get FREE creative work from musicians, film types, tv types, and tons of bright friendly ordinary people
2. Monetize the hell out of it (fine)
3. Allow a sewer community of racists bullies and other terrible people to develop in comments section (negligent but ok it's gotten a little better)
4. Make it hard for visitors to extract original media even though you're purporting to be a hosting service (lame but I can live with it)
5. Cripple playback in basic ways for petty reasons (you're starting to really suck)
6. Try and CHARGE people to undo 5 (Gah!!!!! Die!!!)
I pay for a lot of things. I pay Hulu extra for the ad free version. I pay HBO for HBO Now even though I have a pirated Go login. I buy tv shows on iTunes. I'll even buy movies off friggin' Amazon if it means not pirating them. But I will never pay Google to achieve BASIC playback capabilities on other people's content just on PRINCIPLE. Never. Greedy greedy little leeches. YouTube is a great thing but the people who run it have turned Bad.
You fail to mention that YouTube allows people to monetize off the content they create. There are a whole lot of content creators whose sole income source is YouTube. Many of those videos wouldn't exist if there was no monetary incentive. So, yes, YouTube does profit off a lot of content it doesn't own, but it generates a ton too.
Not really. The truth is more that Google lured independent content creators to their platform with monetization, and is now driving them away by gasligighting them with obscure and impossible to follow rules, to make room for cable tv news shows and inane reality tv stars.
Most of my favorite youtubers have been demonetized, and had to change their content if they wanted to survive. The Alternative History channel was gaslighted pretty bad and their G-rated animated mini-documentary videos got flagged for hate speech(?), while Logan Paul made tens of thousands of dollars from YouTube monetizing his disrespecting a Japanese corpse.
Disabling background play in the YouTube app is driven from the licensing deals they have with record labels. If they don't (make a reasonable attempt to) show the ads they don't have permission to show the video/play the music.
I suspect they could theoretically allow background play for other content but that would be confusing to users.
The stuff I want to background is not music, lately it's been a lot of conference talks, and most of the time there's not even an ad.
Even when I've used YouTube for music, the ads are always pre-roll. If I watch the pre-roll ad, why not let me background at that point?
Google could allow backgrounding for content with no ads. They could allow backgrounding of non musical content if you've watched the ad (they can detect if it's music and what song it is, that's how they pay royalties to labels on songs uploaded by random people). They could allow backgrounding of musical content if you've watched the ad.
YouTube doesn't attempt to handle any of these scenarios. Handling these scenarios would involve an investment of software and possibly legal resources — only to improve the experience of millions and millions of users, and to conserve tons of energy, without making Google any money, and even potentially reducing revenue to YouTube Red (or Premium or whatever it is next week). Why would a company in a monopoly position do that? I get WHY Google won't do this. It's not about licensing, it's about money and motivations. But I'm not going to pay into it.
I came at it from the opposite direction. I prefer Google Play Music to Spotify. Google Play Music comes with a subscription to YouTube Red. Occasionally I will watch a video on YouTube. I appreciate the added value of not needing to watch ads on the occasions that I use YouTube, and knowing that I’m still supporting the content creators even though I don’t consume the ads.
But only very few countries in the world are allowed to pay for YouTube Red, and I don’t get why. I thought every creator had to agree to the terms of service, which would allow YouTube to sell ad-free access via YouTube Red all over the world.
You COULD play any YouTube video in the background on Chrome on iOS until about a year ago. YouTube specifically sabotaged their site by registering hooks that stop the video when the browser loses focus, so you can't even view something in another tab, much less turn the screen off. This "feature" is a regression with no benefit to the user, and Google was so ashamed at what they did that they didn't even tell anyone.
Luckily, you can thwart it by:
1) Requesting the desktop version of a YouTube video
2) Replacing youtube.com with hooktube.com in the address bar
Perhaps soon Google will disable the use of labels in GMail and then charge you for "GMail Red" to get access to them again.
