How to kill YouTube in one stupid step.
I guess their CEO wasn't paying attention when the music industry got trounced by pirating.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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DRM
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Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works (e.g. software, multimedia content) and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.
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Why would it kill YouTube?
Spotify has DRM for all of their songs, it has not killed music streaming.
What this actually does is make it formally illegal to rip YouTube videos (circumventing DRM is against DMCA). It's also a shot against youtube-dlp, which refuses to cross the line of cracking the DRM, which would be doable, but they don't want to on account of the legal issue.
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Probably explains my looping 403 errors on SmartTube, but it eventually loads after several attempts.
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Widevine L3 is trivial to decrypt at this point, there are even APIs on the web to decrypt it. Playready SL2000 is starting to get much easier to decrypt as well.
Forcing TEE based DRM (Widevine L1 and playready SL3000) would have the potential to cause too much collateral damage. They would almost certainly have to have exceptions some devices. If they intentionally break compatibility on browsers other than chrome, they would probably face antitrust issues.
So it is likely there will always either be a way to bypass or decrypt.
I've been thinking about using Nebula. Does anyone has any experience with it?
Its got some great creators, Ive been on there a couple of years. Only downside which some might be glad to be rid of is a lack of comments, and feedback. Without any interaction you're just watching videos; doesn't feel like a community or conversation.
Seems a shame because there are creators who appear to value the voice of the community on a platform where their audience has no voice.
There's a thread from five years ago where a founder Dave Wiskus said they had plans for a thread-like comments section. So it's weird; must not align with whatever else it is they're doing.
I'd say the same thing about dropout TV. How can we get in the comments without a comments section!?
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Wonderful service. Nice, educative sometimes, and entertaining videos. Mixes well with grayjay/my other subscriptions on youtube/odysee.
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More than ever, people need to start using alternatives. I recommend Odysee. It has a couple issues that they're apparently working on but it's easily the best overall alternative.
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Its a shame that content creators don't truly own the content on YouTube and can simply opt out of DRM on their videos.
Also weird timing considering boycotting is a common topic right now.
This kills the YouTube. Maybe not quickly, but it will be a large nail in the coffin should they double down on it.
In a way this enshittificication is necessary to make the replacement possible. Whatever it will be.
I pay for Premium and if they actually do this I'll stop my subscription. Web DRM is stupid and I hate that other Streaming Services already have it. Apart from being another resource sink in browsers, it'll stop third party clients which I use and it also turns off Nvidia Shadowplay which is annoying as it doesn't automatically turn back on once the DRM content is no longer loaded.
Google is also experimenting with my not using YouTube any more.
Funny enough they used to use their own video playback codec which had to be cracked in order for downloaders to work, so technically they've been doing DRM for a long long time.
If they do this my watching 2 hours a day with YouTube Premier is over. I will not subject myself to advertising.
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