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Microsoft YouTube App Strips Ads; Adds Download
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft appears to be sticking a finger in Google's eye with the launch of its new YouTube app for Windows Phone. The app, ReadWrite has confirmed, strips out YouTube ads when it plays back videos and allows users to easily download video by way of a prominent 'download' button."
Data scraping can work, as long as you have a team that can keep up with changes to the interface and counter various approaches to block the scraping-specific requests. Somehow, I don't think this will work for the long-term on Windows Phone systems - but then again, Windows Phone itself may not last too terribly long in this incarnation either, so it may be fine for its purpose, which is to latch onto low-information customers with shallow but momentary appealing features.
Ryan Fenton
Actually AdblockEdge since the creator of the original sold out to an AD COMPANY. GO OPENSOURCE FORKS GO!!
My standard process when installing a web browser includes:
* Block all third-party cookies.
* Install an ad blocker (AdBlock Plus)
* Install a script blocker (NoScript)
* Install a tracker blocker (DoNotTrackMe)
No ads, nowhere, and a much faster, safer, more trouble-free browsing experience.
This isn't cable TV in the 1990s; it's the Internet in the age of web browser extensions. What you're doing is roughly equivalent to taking a piss during a commercial break. That's old, manual technology that requires you to take physical action. Today, there are much, much better methods available that are fully automatic and require absolutely no effort on your part beyond the initial setup. You might want to upgrade your own standard practice.
Youtube can say whatever they want. Whether it is enforceable is another matter.
Saving a YouTube video for later playback on your own machine (i.e. not distributing) is simply "time shifting"... time shifting has been tried time and time again in the courts and it is settled law. What legally comes to your device can be saved and played back at a later date (aka "taping" and now "downloading") and Google can TOS till the cows come home but no TOS ever written and tested in court has ever abridged the right of anyone at any time to time shift.
In other words, download all you want. Rip it to DVDs/CDs. Play it back a million times. Put it on all your devices. There's not a goddamned thing Google, or anyone, can do to stop you... they can add stuff to their TOS from now until doomsday but it does not matter in the least.
Re-distribution is another matter of course.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Bottom left of their page, link: terms.
Section 4b
Section 4j
Section 5b
I'm sure there are also other sections that could be used as justification by youtube to block MS user's access to the content without any problem at all.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Microsoft Tax? EAS is royalty-free, license fee-free and has a patent covenant-not-to-sue so long as it's implemented correctly. Continuing to support it would have cost Google nothing other than the man hours to keep it working. There was no "Microsoft Tax".
lol wut? No it isn't.
"Microsoft licenses the patents for Exchange ActiveSync please contact us for more information."
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/IPLicensing/Programs/exchangeactivesyncprotocol.aspx
"Earlier today Google announced Google Sync, which is made possible by a patent license they obtained from Microsoft covering Google’s implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol on Google servers."
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2009/feb09/02-09statement.aspx
Did you even bother to search before you posted that? Or did you just feel like making up crap for giggles?
And? That was not the parents point. The fact that everybody and a dog are doing shitty, slow and ugly android handsets is nether news, nether surprise. In the high-end of the market Apple/Samsung seems to be about equals, in the $100 market android dominates because barely anybody else bothers with it (you can't compete with 1001 Chinese OEMs hashing out new models every week).
Of course given that the source you cited is 'estimates' and puts Microsoft at 18% while omitting blackberry or Nokia (at low end) altogether raises some credibility questions. Quite large credibility questions.