Hm, good point. I wasn’t considering the long tail of never-watched videos – if the median number of views is very low it could still matter.
> The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't new, so what's changed?
Time has passed and DRM is more ubiquitous on the web these days, and I suspect that the number of people using ad blockers might also be rising, the more ads Youtube is getting.
I don’t doubt that AI might have some effect on it, but I’d be surprised if that was the primary motivation.
Yeah. Remember also that cache misses are much more expensive to serve than cache hits for YT because it falls back to their core datacenters instead of being served from their edge CDN. Scrapers are nothing but cache misses.
> The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't new, so what's changed?
Time has passed and DRM is more ubiquitous on the web these days, and I suspect that the number of people using ad blockers might also be rising, the more ads Youtube is getting.
I don’t doubt that AI might have some effect on it, but I’d be surprised if that was the primary motivation.