[HN Gopher] YouTube is about to pull its apps from Roku
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YouTube is about to pull its apps from Roku
Author : Fervicus
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-10-22 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| Koshkin wrote:
| Too bad - after the YouTube app had silently disappeared from my
| Apple TV, I had to dig up my ancient Roku so I could continue to
| enjoy it. A mini-PC to the rescue, I guess...
| LocalH wrote:
| Literally Cable 2.0. Fuck these assholes, both of them. Neither
| of them has clean hands
| humanistbot wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > The fight between the two companies centers on a 2019 agreement
| to allow YouTube TV on Roku. Roku said Google demanded special
| access to search data from Roku customers as a condition of
| allowing YouTube TV on Roku devices. Roku also said Google asked
| for prioritized search results for YouTube videos in Roku's
| search feature.
|
| > Roku said it agreed to those terms, but also asked that Google
| not ask for any additional data. Google would not commit to that,
| according to Roku, and now both sides are at an impasse. Unless
| both companies come to an agreement before Dec. 9, YouTube's apps
| will disappear from Roku's app store.
| joemi wrote:
| If that's all it is, it's pretty damning of Google.
|
| It'd be nice if they thought of the users they'd be affecting,
| but I guess in a way they are, in that they're upset they can't
| mine those users.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Both sides of the agreement are likely being deceptive in
| their statements. Google says they never asked for
| preferential treatment of search, nor access to user data[0],
| yet Roku says they did.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945280
|
| also see[]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945250
| black_puppydog wrote:
| What you describe really only guarantees that _at least
| one_ of the two is being deceptive.
| TwiceCubed wrote:
| "Both sides" meaning "both sides of Google's lying mouth".
| rnd0 wrote:
| Most likely but that doesn't exclude the possibility that
| Roku is dissembling as well.
| etempleton wrote:
| Google denies that they made this request, but recently
| revealed emails indicate that they did make a request along
| those lines.
|
| Regardless of this deal, Roku is almost certainly dead in the
| water. They have limited international penetration and their
| platform, if you can call it one, is extremely limited
| compared to Apple, Google, and even Amazon's offerings and
| app stores.
|
| I don't see a path forward at this point for the company.
| They will continue to have a stream of ad revenue for awhile,
| but will slowly get squeezed out.
| tyingq wrote:
| They seem to be doing well in North America:
| https://9to5google.com/2021/05/03/roku-global-streaming-
| mark...
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Do you work for google?
| fgonzag wrote:
| They have limited international penetration and their
| platform
|
| Most cheap smart tvs come with roku OS. I wouldn't call
| that limited penetration.
| etempleton wrote:
| Most cheap smart TVs in North America.
| yumraj wrote:
| Few years ago when YouTube app was removed from Fire TV, it had
| turned out to be a major blessing in disguise.
|
| It basically cured my kid's addiction to YT's junk/addictive
| content for young kids.
|
| I'm sure this so benefit at least some people in a similar
| fashion.
| Koshkin wrote:
| OTOH because YT is an invaluable resource for learning, it's
| also a big loss for the kid.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I'm certainly looking forward to it. There's good content for
| kids on youtube, but it's drowning in a sea of low quality or
| downright creepy imitations, and I don't think the algorithm
| can tell the difference. And the ads aren't much better.
| mig39 wrote:
| See also:
|
| Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28943886
| drewg123 wrote:
| Roku should do an official port of NewPipe(1) or SmartTubeNext
| (1) to its platform and install them by default.
|
| (1) These are alternative YouTube clients that block youtube ads,
| and STN even has sponsorblock.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Both of these generally break the TOS of YouTube[0], which
| means Roku distributing such software could be considered
| breaking the CFAA and/or helping their customers do so. Besides
| that, Roku isn't some small OSS project - their previous deal
| with YouTube likely means Google could revel in having real
| damages to bring against Roku for lost ad revenue during the
| entire time the YouTube app was removed and replaced with a
| version that doesn't show ads or shows less relevant ads.
|
| 0:
| https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms#:~:text=circum...
| "Permissions and Restrictions" (2)
| tyingq wrote:
| So Google will have to tell their users to side-load the app on
| the Roku. Just like anyone booted from the Android App store.
| (yes, the Roku does have sideloading, though you can sideload
| only one app at a time.).
| jmondi wrote:
| My solution? Jellyfin and yt-dlp with an easy to use web ui --
| https://github.com/alexta69/metube
| ZetaZero wrote:
| How do I then watch downloaded videos on my Roku? Am I missing
| something?
|
| EDIT: So there is a companion Jellyfin app for Roku
| jmondi wrote:
| Yep just watch the videos through the [Jellyfin Roku
| app](https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku)
| cdurth wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this! Recently started using youtube-dl's
| built in channel scraping but it is clunky and slow. Few months
| ago ads on youtube app on Roku went from aprx 1 per 10 minutes
| to every 3 minutes. Had enough of that and started scraping my
| subscriptions to Plex
| handrous wrote:
| Jellyfin user, this looks _very much_ like something I 've
| wanted. How's Jellyfin do with finding metadata for these sorts
| of files? Getting the full title, date published, grouping by
| creator, anything like that? I'm pretty sure TVDB has listings
| for some long-running and fairly famous Youtube series, but
| it'd be nicer to have a general solution that worked for any
| Youtube video that Jellyfin finds. Plus getting it to find
| Youtube video metadata by TVDB entry would probably require
| some manual filename & folder structure editing.
| darknavi wrote:
| Still a bit clunky but I self-host tubesync and it works
| pretty well:
|
| https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
| jmondi wrote:
| I tried https://github.com/alexmerkel/archivetube but it
| was not a great experience.
|
| I felt that keeping it in Jellyfin and grabbing metadata
| using https://github.com/ankenyr/jellyfin-youtube-metadata-
| plugin was nicer. Plus way more client support than just a
| web browser.
| Fervicus wrote:
| Switched from Plex to Jellyfin a couple of years ago and very
| happy with it!
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I'm a really big plex fan but I've never heard of Jellyfin.
| What triggered your switch?
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| I heard of Jellyfin here on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 (2 years ago)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 (1 month ago)
| Ardon wrote:
| I'm not that guy but I made the same switch.
|
| It's mostly that I despised the way that, fundamentally,
| plex was in control of what user saw when they first logged
| in. They kept adding bs and less technical users kept
| feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them when a
| bunch of stuff would change.
|
| Jellyfin doesn't give me the control I'd _like_ to have,
| but it does give me what I consider essential. This may
| improve when the team transitions to a from-scratch web
| client[1] rather than the forked-from-emby client.
|
| [1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-vue
| handrous wrote:
| Not a Plex user but I switched from Kodi because I've
| _always_ hated Kodi 's UI, and just suffered it for lack of
| anything better (no, alternative skins don't help, both
| because most of them are half-broken, and because most of
| what I dislike seems to be baked into the essential
| structure of their UI).
|
| Gone back and forth between it and just running a simple
| desktop with VLC connected to a TV, for many years.
|
| Happy Jellyfin user for... oh, two or three years now. I
| use it with the Roku app, and sometimes in a browser.
|
| It's got some rough edges, but nothing like Kodi.
|
| One thing I really like is that I can just run it directly
| on my file server. An absolute breeze to get it running in
| Docker. I'm a very lazy sysadmin when I'm on my own time,
| so I've even been relying on Docker to handle restarts and
| such--didn't touch Systemd at all. This isn't exactly best
| practice but I get it "for free" and it's yet to fail. If
| it does, well, it's not like it's a big deal. Kodi samba
| shares to play remote media have always sucked to set up,
| but this instead provides an API for clients to browse and
| then stream one video remotely--the clients don't need any
| form of actual access to the files (I think there are ways
| to set Kodi up like that, too, so you've got it two places
| and one's just playing media from the other, but the last
| thing I wanted was even _more_ complexity in my Kodi set-up
| and config process)
|
| Being able to hop on a browser anywhere and edit config and
| media metadata is _so very much_ nicer than trying to do it
| on a TV. The in-browser UI 's also pretty damn good for
| watching stuff.
|
| I haven't tried it, but I understand there's a plugin _for_
| Kodi that lets you play your Jellyfin library through it.
| If I ever set up Kodi again, for some reason, that 's
| exactly what I'll do. No "native" file access in Kodi, just
| a thin frontend for Jellyfin.
|
| Somewhere on my long list of shit I'll never actually get
| around to doing is writing a Jellyfin browser & player
| "core" for Retroarch. Now _that_ would be perfect.
|
| [EDIT] Oh, I like its account management way better than
| Kodi's, too. Very easy to configure (through the browser,
| like nearly everything else). My kids have access to one
| set of content, my wife and I each have an account with
| access to everything, so our "watched" statuses don't
| interfere for stuff we watch on our own time. It's great.
| jmondi wrote:
| Jellyfin is a completely open source and community driven
| fork of Emby, which was a rebrand of "Media Browser" way
| back in the day.
|
| Plex is just creepy, doing things like requiring you to
| sign up and log in through their web portal instead of
| using the local plex server. Even before the [onslaught of
| money put into it
| recently](https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/plex-
| raises-50m-growth-rou...) Plex did weird things requiring
| you to ping their servers. I imagine this is going to
| increase tenfold over the next few years. Gotta hit those
| KPI's after all.
|
| Overall, Jellyfin does not have the shine that Plex has. As
| a user of Jellyfin since day 1, it is getting better and
| better every day. At this point, the only platform that
| doesnt have a Jellyfin app that I really wish it did was
| PlayStation.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| There needs to be ways ensuring that content remains a commodity
| and does not enable rent-seeking. Imagine where we would be today
| if each television station had it's own antenna and encoding just
| to seek more profit.
| Spivak wrote:
| Wait what? Content has never been a commodity and copyright is
| by definition rent-seeking just without the negative
| connotations.
|
| You might mean content distribution but that's really never
| been a commodity either. Even though it sorta kinda feels like
| you can buy "cable" from lots of companies that's only because
| each company independently negotiated contracts for all their
| channels. Physical distribution -- B&N/Blockbuster/Record
| Stores (and OG DVD Netflix) is the closest thing you could call
| commodity content distribution.
|
| But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on
| with DRM and locked-down clients which put platform owners in a
| similar spot to cable companies and so here we are.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Facebook and Google have made content a commodity. That's the
| entire point of aggregators.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _copyright is by definition rent-seeking just without the
| negative connotations_
|
| > _But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early
| on with DRM and locked-down clients_
|
| DRM is nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for
| existing copyright though. So that's a bit like saying
| "copyright is a great thing as long as it only exists on
| paper".
| arenaninja wrote:
| I've been waiting for a device to smarten up my TVs so the kids
| can stream on it but without YouTube. If google goes through with
| this I will buy some Rokus :)
| SllX wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, and feel free to ignore this question if
| you'd rather not say, but why something specifically without
| YouTube, but presumably other streaming apps?
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| Not OP. My guess is because YouTube offers user uploaded
| content, unlike all the other streaming services like
| Netflix, Disney+
| massysett wrote:
| The crap that's on YouTube makes the cable TV networks
| targeted at kids look like educational television. Horrid
| stuff with kids shooting off their mouths.
| hbn wrote:
| It's pretty reasonable, and smart I'd say. The kids content
| on YouTube has been heavily gamed by content farms optimizing
| content for SEO, making absolutely bizarre and sometimes
| disgusting content.
|
| Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8
|
| (It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has
| changed, and possibly has gotten worse)
| [deleted]
| strombofulous wrote:
| Search for a period (just ".") and pick any of the things
| youtube recommends (don't press enter on your "." query).
| These are the kinds of videos it tends to suggest to kids.
| Someone else posted a detailed explanation on why but tldr is
| that kids are curious about things that they don't understand
| and adults exploited this curiosity.
|
| Edit: And also this trick is known by a lot of kids according
| to a friend I have that works at a public school
| dmitrygr wrote:
| oh wow. Never tried this. Lots of very very weird things,
| like this (do not click):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB910KU0myQ
| pixelbath wrote:
| The article says this is "the latest battle between a Big Tech
| giant and a smaller technology firm." Roku is a technology spin-
| off of Netflix that went public on its own and last year reported
| revenue of nearly a billion dollars.
|
| Sure, Roku is "smaller" than Google, but I disagree with the
| characterization of Roku as some poor upstart that's getting
| ground underfoot by Big Tech.
| greatgib wrote:
| Here people can see how Google is a sucker for your data...
| chmod775 wrote:
| Google at this point is just coasting along on its old
| reputation, while consistently behaving in a way one might expect
| from the Microsoft of old.
|
| Doing a thing, getting called out, and then lying - only to get
| bitten by a leaked paper trail is such a Microsoft thing to do.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Roku should add Odysee to their platform, and dethrone youtube
| already. Time for decentralized solutions.
| nimfan wrote:
| https://channelstore.roku.com/details/9c8df00ea3b378467cfced...
| !
|
| Disclaimer: Haven't tried this yet.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Roku could do the world a favor by featuring newer alternate
| video sharing platforms, particularly decentralized ones. It
| could also make it clear why they're offering them and rally
| users to their support.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-10-22 23:01 UTC)