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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."
Give them a day. I'll bet it stops working tomorrow.
It's about time Microsoft did something nice for users.
It gives YouTube the right to block it.
And by doing so, may block all of MS products.
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
Never seen one. The only explanation that seems plausible is that they're hidden in the time between opening YouTube link, muting the sound, switching to another browser tab, occupying yourself for about thirty seconds, and then switching back; you know, the standard process everyone follows.
If you don't have a youtube downloader in your browser, it's because you don't want one. And if you're seeing ads in youtube it's because you're not using adblock plus.
Youtube is supposed to paywall some premium content soon, which is fine. I'm not watching it anyway, so I'm not downloading it either. The kind of stuff I download from youtube mostly involves documentaries on subjects like Waco or what kids are eating, and I'm not also streaming it, so there's really no good reason for them to try to stop me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Getting the direct download link to the video is easy, every youtube app can implement this without any effort. And if you build your own player based on it, ads just disappear as a side-effect.
Popcorn a popp'n !
This looks to be premium entertainment. ;)
If Ballmer is behind this MS move, could he be sent to jail for 30 years for it? All american should be treatead equally under the law, after all.
Simple as that.
Get a real business model. Ads on every freaking video are SOOOO annoying.
Sooo can I get xbox live with ADs stripped out of also Microsoft? Seeing as I pay for the service!
Not to be mean to you personally, but we don't fucking care. Just like we don't fucking care that ABC doesn't like us recording shows on our DVRs and watching them later without having to suffer through the horrible, loud, insulting-to-the-intelligence ads. We don't care that Sony and BMG want us to buy entire CDs of music, rather than download songs, or worse yet, find other music to listen to.
So, if your profession is making videos, and your income is based on ads played during those videos on a communal website, you may want to think of a better revenue stream. This one isn't going to last, whether Microsoft can pull this off or not.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If Google and Microsoft get into a DMCA slap-fight, then it will be hilarious for the rest of us.
I guess this little stunt won't help all the Win 8 users who lost support for Google Cal & Contacts. It's a pity they're both playing political "Cold War" with each other.
Sadly, violating a website's TOS is a crime under the CFFA.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Youtube has ads?
Who knew?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Supposed you want to wish your mother a Happy Dub Step Mothers Day with this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J0o65u73Nc
But you want to strip the adds and go fullscreen:
Easy, simply change the URL: delete "watch?v=" and replace with "v/"
http://www.youtube.com/v/9J0o65u73Nc
sarcasm
Microsoft must have some really smart developers to have figured out how to rewrite the YouTube URL using computer programming. I am going to run out and get a Surface with Windows 8 before Best Buy closes tonight. Microsoft might be adding more useful features soon and I don't want to miss out. It would be a shame to watch a 5 second YouTube Ad and support that rich Google company. Microsoft is sticking it to man! Wait, I thought they were the man. Hmmm... something has changed. I'm so confused.
sarcasm
A company and a society are judged and remembered by what they build and not what they destroy.
He's an example of somebody sent to prison for it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Send in the briefcase drill team! Warm up the bench. Choose your venues. Ready? FIGHT!
Microsoft is unlikely to comply with the TOS, its not in their nature.
I think Google will then encode the ads into the video stream, and make the video clickable. Sure you'll have lost the ability to close the advert early, because the video will contain it, and you've lost the bit of the video below the ad square, but you did anyway. And Microsoft has given them an excuse to do it.
For downloads, they won't offer the high resolution streams to Windows Phone devices, only the low res phone resolutions, and Microsoft will have enabled that too, by putting the download button in!
See this is a pissing match Microsoft cannot win, because they needed Google's Youtube far far far more than than Google needs Windows Phone users. The only reason they won't block them outright at this point is because MS would squeal anti-trust (which is perhaps their aim with these games, get an excuse to squeal anti-trust monopoly abuse since 75% of smartphones are Android these days).
That does not remove the ads...
Does AdBlock Plus block inline video ads that have been seen in New Zealand for the past year?
If it doesn't, you'll be in for a shock when it's rolled out in your hemisphere.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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
cclive and youtube-dl?
It's a single "official" app made and endorsed by a nice, big, slow company that can be targeted very easily AND has a history and bad rep with both law enforcement and working together with other companies/groups (including, in recent times, its own manufacturing "partners"), compared to a handful of plugins and extensions scattered around the internet by a disconnected-at-best developer base whose "owners" vanish suddenly when targeted?
Also, there's the fact that Microsoft might sort of want the cooperation of the media companies later, something that might be harder to do now that they're flipping them bird by showing total disrespect for published media. While the fly-by-night YouTube downloaders have nothing to lose, Microsoft has quite a few feet they're short-sightedly shooting here. That's what makes it different.
You seem to forget that Google could easily use the three magic words that nullify hundreds of years of precedence. "On a computer"
fine... open your wallet... takers are SOOOO annoying.
I fucking wish I could pay as little to watch a TV show or movie as a comparable set of ads would return in revenue for being in front of my eyeballs.
Instead, some dickhead thinks I should pay ~5-10 cents a minute to watch one episode of his TV show. Naturally, 1080p costs twice as much too.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
If Google doesn't decide to ignore this, I would suggest they license the rights to the Rick Aston video, detect if the connection is coming from this software and RickRoll anyone using it.
The total market however more than doubled in that time. Apple is still gaining market. It's just losing it's fractional share of unit sales.
If instead you measure the market in revenue, rather than unit sales. Then apple is rising in fractional market share. Moreover It's margins are also vastly higher. So in terms of profit it has a majority of the market.
There have been extensions for this, on various browsers, for years. I don't see how this is sticking anything to Google when any idiot user can install a few extensions to his browser and get the same result.
Not news. More like Olds.
Does AdBlock Plus block inline video ads that have been seen in New Zealand for the past year?
As far as I know, yes. I've seen inline video ads on services when I have forgotten to install ABP on a system, and installed and then not seen them any more. But, maybe not. I'm not in NZ so it's hard for me to tell.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I sometimes end up at a browser without adblock plut. It's like a totally different internet. (One that should be killed with fire.)
Well, we do not really know what they consider premium content, but I think the idea is great as it will make people more aware of other sites that host cat videos.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
For years downloading the flv file and then watching it in mplayer was the only way to watch youtube videos on Linux, because the Adobe flash player was unwatchable and drained batteries in minutes.
The download occurs as a result of viewing it. The download button really just saves the download as a file.
Tell that to Ghengis Khan or Alexander (remember that Persian empire that stretched from India to Mesopotamia).
The good the men do is oft interred with their bones, but the evil that men do lives on.
Youtube can say whatever they want. Whether it is enforceable is another matter.
Of course it's enforceable. You are assuming you have a legal right to view YouTube videos, but you very much do not. If Google *chooses* to send you the video *THEN* you have the right to "time shift" it all you want. But the former is very much not a legal right. If Google decides to cut off your YouTube access there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Well, you can play the whole "arms race" game, but this is also a clear violation of YouTube's API rules and if MS gets serious about trying to bypass that Google will just sue them (and win in a pretty clear cut case). But that won't happen. Google will smack them down, MSFT will bitch and moan and use it to push some FUD around, but they'll still play by the rules.
This is *my* computer, you have absolutely no control over it.
This argument is fucking idiotic. If you take your own bag to the store and pack it full of stuff, do you bitch when security stops you from walking out? "But it's MY BAG!". Or how about if a cop gives you a ticket for speeding? "but it's MY CAR". If your boss decides not to pay you, I'm fairly sure he will be unable to convince you not to sue his ass by claiming "but it's my office!"
Yes, it is your computer. But it's not your content. Content you are using said computer to pirate. Ignoring the legal aspects, that makes you an asshole, plain and simple. Maybe you're fine being an asshole, I don't know. But grow up and own the fact that you're an asshole instead of this whiny bullshit about "my computer!"
Youtube can say whatever they want. Whether it is enforceable is another matter.
Of course it's enforceable. You are assuming you have a legal right to view YouTube videos, but you very much do not. If Google *chooses* to send you the video *THEN* you have the right to "time shift" it all you want. But the former is very much not a legal right. If Google decides to cut off your YouTube access there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Aren't there laws against arbitrary denial of service? I'm not sure how far you can go, but if youtube refused to serve members of certain political parties, or people based on their religion or descent, I'm pretty sure there is plenty that could be done about that. I'm not sure how far those laws go, and it probably varies from country to country. But it wouldn't surprise me if refusing to serve people who exersise a right guaranteed by law would be grounds for a successful lawsuit.
I didn't know "User of MS Youtube client for Windows Phone 8" was race, political affiliation or religion. Using a client that breaks TOS would be TOS violation by itself, no discrimination there.
Now if they'd start deliberately blocking TOS-conforming ways to access Youtube from WinPhone, that'd be something FTC and likes would like to hear about.
PS: "Using a specific webservice" is not a "right guaranteed by law".
So it will be like AdBlocker and Keep it! on a PC, right?
Lock in is a common argument, but the data does not support it. The reason they are failing is the market went mobile and their mobile software sucked. It's really ad simple as that.
Google made a public gesture of refusing to develop official Google/Maps/YouTube apps for Windows Phone. This is just Microsoft's Tat to Google's Tit; no more "malicious" than Google's public snub.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Given that they were asked to do that while the Windows Phone 7 was still the king of the hill with perhaps 100 users and clear roadmap to be abandoned - I'm not all that surprised.
Microsoft has tried to bribe me to port some of the software to Windows Phone as well. I played with SDK (nice, no questions asked), phone (again, absolutely reasonable and nice device) and promptly decided that my time would be better spent scratching my balls. It is a dead platform with no users and no prospects, regardless of what Microsoft/Nokia tries to tell us. Shall it change, I'll be happy to reconsider my position.
The real cash cow here is the 30% of every Apple Store sale that Apple rakes in for just sitting there.
That is what has been the driving force behind Microsoft and the development of Windows 8. They have been watching that 30% of every app sold, and they are salivating. Windows RT is the clue. The quantity of software sold for Windows computers is jaw dropping. If Microsoft can wrangle 30% of that whole market by forcing themselves in as the middleman it will be a HUGE tsunami of dollars.
As an observer to this my question is: Will enough people fall into the trap that they can convert the whole market? You have an OS that is only optimized as a handheld interface and it is being rammed down the throats of every person trying to buy the "updated version" of the most entrenched desktop OS in the world.
Maybe the revolt against the useless desktop interface will change the direction things appear to be heading but the direction of the majority of people makes no sense to me anyway.
And maybe the unbelievably lame and irritating commercial of stupid dancing kids pretending to do business will go away. They aren't selling a single unit to business with a commercial like that. They are just making them change the channel.
This removes the video ads that play prior to the main video. The onscreen popups may still appear. Someone else please verify.
I don't see adds with it either way. I guess my add blocking in Firefox is enough.
Do you also block subtracts?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Until they DRM their content, then circumventing that in the US becomes a felony. As I recall, Chrome has been onboard having DRM added to the W3C standards for html5.
it's drm'd against saving. ;).
not very well.. but still.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I don't know what you're getting so worked up over.
Oh, I'm not getting worked up at all. The "fucking" part of "we don't fucking care" is just a quantifier.
If I had simply written, "We don't care.", it sounds more like apathy than the result of actual consideration of various situations, and years of experience with this situation in particular.
If I had used, "We really don't care.", it sounds like maybe we do care, or at least you have the pretext to believe we do. This is the response that ABC, Sony, etc., have been using for years to be bigger assholes than the year before.
Basically, the fact that you think the use of the word "fucking" means I'm frothing at the mouth means I got across my main point, that I/we do not care that creators of content are not seeing income from "horrible, loud, insulting-to-the-intelligence ads."
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Aren't there laws against arbitrary denial of service?
For a service you don't pay for? No.
If you don't have a youtube downloader in your browser, it's because you don't want one.
Amen. I personally do not block ads just yet because I mostly visit sites like Reddit, /., Techdirt and some of the Twitch streamers that benefit from be consuming their content.
Besides, randomly, Reddit will thank me for not blocking ads and give me a pat on the back. Whatever. It's Something!
Windows 8 tablets have, what, 2% of the market? It might be a while before Google even notices!
Suppose a grocery store had their door wide open, and a big banner out front:
"Come in! Take what you want! It's all FREE!**"
** produce may contain venomous mind-altering spiders that will turn you into an obedient zombie slave.
So now, I put on my spider-proof suit before entering the store, and when I get home, I rinse all the produce in boiling acid to kill off the spiders. When the grocery store manager calls me up to say "Hey, asshole, we make all our money off reselling zombie slaves! How do you expect us to give you free groceries, if you protect yourself from the spiders?," I'm not gonna be particularly receptive to his arguments.
How could a story of MS and google turn into a apple bashing in the comments.. ????
Game. Set. Match.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Thanks for the additional input. As I said, I'm not saying this to be mean to you. If you make videos that others want to see, more power to you. My daughter follows a couple different guys that make hilarious videos. She even has a shirt from one of their web stores. So it's not about you making money off our actions.
It's just that ads have gotten more out of control over the years. So now those of us that know how, block them. As do many of our family members, co-workers, customers, friends, and so on. Now that product placement is getting more prevalent in TV shows, they are going to face a similar backlash effect. It's one thing to have the characters drinking Starbucks coffee, but when they start telling each other what's on sale this week some of us will stop watching. Others will be happy to know what's on sale without all those annoying commercial breaks.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I don't watch your content AT ALL, yet you call me a pirate and criminal, while YOU claim I am stealing by not watching your ads in exchange for something I do not want nor have ever sought out to get.
You do NOT have the right to force your content on us, nor the right to claim not watching your content and ads is theft, all at the same time causing billions of dollars in damage world wide by infecting computers everywhere with your malware and trojans.
What the fuck are you babbling about? If you don't watch youtube videos, why do you care if youtube shows ads? And why are you wanting to block something you don't see anyway? And how in the fucking hell is a 30 second pre-roll video "malware and trojans"?
I suppose that'd be a stupid analogy that doesn't match what we are discussing.
But yes, you'd still be violating society's rules (and laws). You do not have a right to what that store is offering, so if you don't like its rules too fucking bad, don't go there.
Although if that actually happened all you'd do is get the owner arrested for attempted homicide. Like, seriously, because your analogy is bad.
No you have it backwards. If you don't want to be part of the culture, lock up your content and don't show it to anyone. If someone can see it, they can tell someone about it, sharing in its most basic sense. *GASP* without paying you!
I say you make your works private and then you can have them all to your self! no one will get your precious content in any way you deem unfit! Perfect solution.
-
Lol wut? Are you high?
Sorry, based on your post above, I thought this was the thread for wildly loose analogies. And where, in my post above, was I breaking any rules/laws? Corporations are trying to redefine how the web works, in order to establish a new "social contract" for commerce that doesn't work like the traditional "I give you money for stuff, then use stuff as I want." If you want to sell your content on the internet, then *sell your content on the internet*: take payment for it before letting it go out *your* door.
Here's perhaps a more careful analogy for how the internet works: I never enter your store. You have a storefront with a walk-up window (and maybe a big sign saying "Welcome! Free groceries!"). Anyone can send their browser agent to walk up and say "Hey! give me a rutabaga!" or likewise. It's your choice how to respond --- you can ignore them; you can tell them "we don't have rutabagas"; you can say "rutabagas are for paying customers only, please hand over your credit card first"; you can hand them a pile of cat photos; you can give them a rutabaga; you can give them a rutabaga with a religious tract stapled to the side. But whatever you hand over to them is now *theirs* to do with as they want. Scream all you want: "hey, no fair throwing the religious tract away before taking the rutabaga back to your master!", but my browser is OK to ignore you.
Corporations want to redefine how law works on the internet, such that by printing "by taking a rutabaga, you agree to read this religious tract" on the religious tract they hand out with the rutabaga, I am morally and/or legally bound to do so. But this is complete rubbish, and I utterly reject it. I block ads on websites. I never signed a contract with them saying "I will watch your ads." I sent my browser to their storefront, and they willingly handed over an ad-laden rutabaga, knowing that I had never agreed to their terms. If you don't like people stripping away your ads, then *don't hand out (ad-laden) content to any anonymous stranger who walks up and asks for it*. It's *your* responsibility to create a valid pre-existing contract with people viewing your content, and restrict who you hand out content to.
They should implement the same functionality in a Windows 8 (Windows Store) app. Furthermore, if the user clicks a link to a youtube video in an email or app the OS should launch the app instead of the browser. Now that would be awesome.
DMCA is Digital Milllenium Copyright Act. Not watching ads is not a violation of copyright. Downloading the material is not a violation of copyright because it is on a public server and actually set up for downloads. Whether it is a terms of service violation is something else, but NOT a DMCA question.
The free market disagrees.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wow.
Everyone thought this was a comment about blocking ads.
It was a comment about no one using Windows Phone.
It's good to hear some real-world experiences.
I honestly thought we'd end up focusing on what a "Tat" is, and how big a "Google's Tit" is, this being slashdot and all.
Corporations are trying to redefine how the web works, in order to establish a new "social contract" for commerce that doesn't work like the traditional "I give you money for stuff, then use stuff as I want." If you want to sell your content on the internet, then *sell your content on the internet*: take payment for it before letting it go out *your* door.
No, they are not trying to redefine anything. YouTube functions the exact same way broadcast TV does, and the radio before that. It's a business model that has existed for 90 years now.
And guess what? YouTube *does* take "payment" before letting the content go out the door. The ad comes first, THEN the content.
Corporations want to redefine how law works on the internet, such that by printing "by taking a rutabaga, you agree to read this religious tract" on the religious tract they hand out with the rutabaga, I am morally and/or legally bound to do so. But this is complete rubbish, and I utterly reject it. I block ads on websites. I never signed a contract with them saying "I will watch your ads." I sent my browser to their storefront, and they willingly handed over an ad-laden rutabaga, knowing that I had never agreed to their terms. If you don't like people stripping away your ads, then *don't hand out (ad-laden) content to any anonymous stranger who walks up and asks for it*. It's *your* responsibility to create a valid pre-existing contract with people viewing your content, and restrict who you hand out content to.
Your incredibly selfish position is self-defeating. Fortunately everyone doesn't behave like you do, or the internet would actually regress all the way back to the BBS days of old. Then again, I suspect many people here actually WANT that, but fortunately that population is far too small to matter.
No, they are not trying to redefine anything. YouTube functions the exact same way broadcast TV does, and the radio before that. It's a business model that has existed for 90 years now.
Exactly, on which I mute, or record and fast forward over, the ads. Which has been established by long legal precedent to be *absolutely legal,* and is only considered the least bit unethical by *fucking corporatist authoritarian assholes.* It's the TV network's problem if too many people decide that ads suck, and they go out of business; it's not the TV watcher's sacred responsibility to support the business model by staring at the ads.
Debian - the wellknown Linux distribution - did the same on the last stable version just recently released, Wheezy - http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/
The addon Adblock Plus is installed and enabled by default on the Iceweasel (ie Firefox) browser, with EasyList filter activated :
http://i.imgur.com/g0pMEaX.png - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=693160
Even if I use some ads and tracking blockers, too (when there are animated banners, or sound, or to protect my privacy), IMHO it should be only the user who decides to put them, not the OS supplier, because it has an incidence on the web sites and numeric economy...
> You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube
But ... I do see a "download" button, on every YouTube page, I think it's right next to the like and dislike buttons.
And I agree: Absolutely standard. Oh, and you left out the standard, built-in firefox sync. Or that I'm using 17ESR so that I have the same profiles even from my 10.5 PPC macs that don't officially support it but still work (TenFourFox).
I've had that download button from YouTube for years. Is that EULA implying that they'll remove it?