Would you pay for Youtube downloads?
Mikey 6 comments
What was once speculation is now official, Youtube is starting to integrate paid downloads into its service for Youtube partners.
It's not that surprising considering Google has not been able to find an effective way to make money from Youtube, but I wonder how confident they are on this idea. last time I checked, there isn't much demand for downloading videos that can easily be obtained for free.
What I mean by that is you can already download any video on Youtube with the help of one of the many Firefox add-ons available for free (I use download helper), and with what I understand about how Flash media is handled in web pages, there will be nothing Google can do to prevent this from happening on downloads that are charged for.
With or without the demand, it probably wont affect the vast majority of Youtube users.
EricVonZipper
Friday 13th February 2009 | 02:03 PMTo answer your question, no.
Slightly off-topic. Mikey. Another way to download a video from Youtube, is to simply add "pwn" before the word of "youtube" in the url. Example: "www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v="
It might be handy for people at work that can not install browser extensions and/or other programs.
Personally, I mostly use "pwn" for youtube and/or a greasemonkey script that enhances the (perhaps the worst damn video player i've seen) youtube player, with many new buttons under the player.
Anyway. Back on-topic. I'm already pissed at Youtube for their "sorry, you can watch this in your country" (or similar wording) messages. Start charging, no matter the content and i'll go elsewhere.
Jim
Friday 13th February 2009 | 07:28 PMOnly a small percentage, maybe .00001% of the stuff on YouTube is worth watching in the first place. That makes maybe .00001% of that worth downloading, and only because you know it'll be taken down by the man. I guess the short answer is no, I sure as hell won't pay for a damned thing from YouTube.
Haddy
Friday 13th February 2009 | 07:42 PMNo chance. It would have to be some pretty spectacular stuff for me to pay. I think more people would pay to not have comments on the site :-P
MIZIEYA
Sunday 15th February 2009 | 12:11 PMMmmm I'd have an issue with paying for a youtube download because of the variance in quality which is due in part to the bandwidth...or some mechanism that I am totally unfamiliar with- which from my view point as someone who uploads a whole lot of nonesense there - is a major headache, especially considering that other music or video websites have a much better service, bandwidth and all that jazz. I wonder though is there an issue of copyright and reproduction infringement if youtube is going to go ahead with this? Seems a tad iffy to me...all things considered.
Jake Farr-Wharton
Monday 16th February 2009 | 07:52 AMHi Mikey, wasn't aware of download helper. Cheers.
Kim OJ
Friday 13th February 2009 | 01:08 PMThe trick will probably be in the video quality. If YouTube starts accepting larger files for better resolution downloads, I could see people paying for the full dvd convertible resolution.