The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

I think there's definitely an argument to be made that Google needs YouTube downloaders to work in some capacity, since a lot of their biggest and most profitable creators rely on them. Think news outlets/streamers/YouTubers that analyse video game/film/TV show trailers, reaction channels, drama YouTubers and celebrity YouTubers, essay channels in general, etc. Very few of those can afford to record all their own footage for their videos, simply due to how much time and effort it'd take. They rely on things like longplay channels and official company channels posting trailers for material, and bring Google a ton of traffic in return.

So there's probably at least some calculation where they have to decide how much effort they're putting into cracking down on these things, simply because on the one hand they don't want to anger Hollywood and music labels, and on the other hand they don't want to kill off 3/4 of media analysis content on the platform.

There's also the fact a lot of creators will deliberately turn a blind eye to people reusing their video footage so long as they credited in return. For a lot of them, it's less work to just let people figure out how to get the footage from their channels than to set up a third party hosting service where you can officially download them.

Interesting to hear about the terms of service provision though. Wonder how well it would hold up now given that a lot of modern outlets use donations or paid subscriptions for financing rather than ads? I can see an outlet like 404 Media covering YouTube downloaders at some point because of that.