The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

> Google needs YouTube downloaders. They perform a valuable role: If it were impossible to download YouTube videos, many organizations would abandon hosting their videos on YouTube for a platform that offered more user flexibility. Or they’d need to host a separate download link and put it in their YouTube descriptions. But organizations don’t need to jump through hoops -- they just let people use YouTube downloaders.

I don't think I believe this, as much as I'd like to. How many organizations would really consider this a critical need? My guess is, not enough for Google to care.

Also, if you upload a video to YouTube you can download it from YouTube Studio at any time, so that doesn't add up at all.

YouTube just doesn't make this available via API, but you've always been able to manually from YouTube Studio download your uploaded videos.

That sounds brutal if you have 5 years of daily uploads or something like that. At some point, if you want your entire catalog, that becomes a very sucky process.

Just use Google Takeout. It will create a series of archive files for you to download.

If you talk about the vast majority of corporate videos (and written material) they mostly don’t care about access after 18 months or so. And in fact may well actively want to scrub them because info is no longer accurate.