Shhh! We are going to have to fork it again if too many people find out.
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DRM was.. and still is dumb... as it collectively punishes paying customers. While ContentID is sometimes abused by brazen scammers, it is a better solution given the majority of content is still served off the YT platform. =3
Maybe it's true in other contexts, but users of such frontend likely are not paying for youtube and they're also not paying with their eyes (ads) so the DRM here is working as intended...
Also paying customers are already allowed to download youtube videos (granted they can't watch it outside of youtube but it still counters your broadband claim).
Sure, but it is not users that ultimately make that policy choice, and may be rescinded at any time. Thus, still seems lame...
Most streaming platforms have fragile resolution fail-back thresholds, and rightfully discourage camping on CDN host connections for 10 times longer than most of the users.
These days the amount of media data people consume in a year will be disproportionately larger than the capacity of any information appliance. i.e. not paying for the service would still mean a fortune in offline storage devices.
DRM still sucks, ask any library or historian. But I do respect your opinion, as it could seem true for some. =3
Both YT premium and Netflix is around $100/yr, and I seriously doubt you will find 14TB consumer storage media at that cost. It is a silly behavior for sure =3
The more interesting point though is that at ~5 GB/hour (a decent bitrate, especially for youtube) and $15/TB, you're looking at ~$0.075/hour of video. If something isn't worth $0.08 to keep, is it worth your time to watch? This is probably a question media companies would prefer you not ask yourself.
Something about media compression that drew our attention to quality versus efficiency:
"Typically, the production style of low quality media of the same duration creates smaller compressed video data." (Joel's corollary 6)
This was mostly because the producers increased the number of re-used video clips like stock-footage/B-roll, lower grade non-broadcast quality audio, and filming style focused on simpler tripod work with low-textured similar looking environments at fewer locations. Thus, the self-similar nature of low budget films made relatively smaller files, and were compressed into shorter track lengths on storage media.
While the budget constraints are very indicative of bad film, it does not necessarily always mean relatively smaller video files for the same media playtime indicate lame content. However, of the thousands of titles we processed at that company, it was correlated most of the time if all other factors were held the same. Now some people did like "The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black", but with perceptual compression it was a tiny track-length compared to most other films.
I'd wager streaming media ultimately has similar unconscious fiscal incentives to create lower quality content that decreases distribution costs.
Best of luck =3