18 votes

YouTube blocks MIT OpenWare and Blender videos, asks for monetization agreement

10 comments

  1. [9]
    acr
    Link
    Blender is an incredible application. People are making incredible things with it and other open source software, why would you to block them? What do they stand to gain?

    Blender is an incredible application. People are making incredible things with it and other open source software, why would you to block them? What do they stand to gain?

    9 votes
    1. [8]
      Gyrfalcon
      Link Parent
      Seems like Google wants to be able to play ads on these videos for revenue. Blocking the videos and then negotiating is quite the swashbuckling stance on their part, though.

      Seems like Google wants to be able to play ads on these videos for revenue. Blocking the videos and then negotiating is quite the swashbuckling stance on their part, though.

      9 votes
      1. [7]
        ahquemeneye
        Link Parent
        Which seems odd considering their trend of demonetizing completely SFW videos lately. Someone who reviews food for a living and hasn't even used a single swear word on his channel has been...

        Which seems odd considering their trend of demonetizing completely SFW videos lately. Someone who reviews food for a living and hasn't even used a single swear word on his channel has been striked.

        Meanwhile, a nonprofit wants to avoid putting ads on their channel, but YT won't let them. I was told that it it possible to put some swear words in white noise that viewers are unable to hear, but YT's bots notice and strike videos for it. If that actually works, it might be a good solution for Blender.

        4 votes
        1. [6]
          pseudolobster
          Link Parent
          Oh, that makes perfect sense though, when you think about it. Youtube wants advertisers to pay them, so they want a bunch of family-friendly videos they can put their ads on. Videos that are not...

          Oh, that makes perfect sense though, when you think about it. Youtube wants advertisers to pay them, so they want a bunch of family-friendly videos they can put their ads on. Videos that are not family-friendly are just as bad as those that are family-friendly, but they can't put ads on.

          I'd wager blender's videos as an ad space would command a very high premium to certain software companies. I'm certain adobe, for instance, would love to put ads for their software on every blender tutorial, and would be willing to pay a substantial amount of money to do so.

          3 votes
          1. [5]
            Zeerph
            Link Parent
            While I can't disagree with the point, I think that there is little chance that MIT or the Blender Foundation would ever acquiesce to putting advertisements on their content, and will just find...

            I'd wager blender's videos as an ad space would command a very high premium to certain software companies.

            While I can't disagree with the point, I think that there is little chance that MIT or the Blender Foundation would ever acquiesce to putting advertisements on their content, and will just find other platforms to host it.

            Though, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that an advertising company is trying to make more money by putting ads on things at the expense of content.


            It does seem that Blender are already testing their videos on peertube. Whether or not that catches on as a platform remains to be seen. But, I imagine, at this point it's a better option that waiting for Google to just change their mind about monetization.

            3 votes
            1. [4]
              pseudolobster
              Link Parent
              I'm not sure youtube cares, from a financial standpoint. Videos that have a lot of views with no ads cost the company money. The consumer goodwill lost by nuking these videos is a drop in the...

              I'm not sure youtube cares, from a financial standpoint. Videos that have a lot of views with no ads cost the company money. The consumer goodwill lost by nuking these videos is a drop in the bucket compared to the ad revenue they have "lost" by the blender foundation not monetizing their videos.

              It's a terrible way of looking at things, but if you think about this like a shareholder wanting to maximize return on their investment it makes perfect sense. Shareholders are driven by quarterly profit, a thing youtube has never really delivered. Lately youtube has been ramping up policies that are advertiser-friendly while being consumer and producer unfriendly. This is of course evil, but not irrational or unexpected for them to do as a company.

              3 votes
              1. [3]
                Zeerph
                Link Parent
                Do you think with a move towards advertising only, that Youtube is creating their own, more decentralised, competition?

                Do you think with a move towards advertising only, that Youtube is creating their own, more decentralised, competition?

                2 votes
                1. [2]
                  pseudolobster
                  Link Parent
                  I was actually just talking about that yesterday in another thread. Bascially, running a video site like youtube requires an enormous amount of servers. A distributed system would run into huge...

                  I was actually just talking about that yesterday in another thread. Bascially, running a video site like youtube requires an enormous amount of servers. A distributed system would run into huge problems where most people's internet connections don't have very good upload speeds, most people don't have hundreds of gigs of free space, and most people don't want their video cards being used for transcoding at all time just to be able to view a decentralized youtube alternative.

                  In the future, if moore's law remains even approximately true, we should be able to do this at some point. Not today though.

                  3 votes
                  1. Zeerph
                    Link Parent
                    I seem to have forgotten I actually read that and I do agree with the points you presented. However, I wonder if they could do a bit of both? Maybe have the main servers host the whole library of...

                    I seem to have forgotten I actually read that and I do agree with the points you presented.

                    However, I wonder if they could do a bit of both? Maybe have the main servers host the whole library of content and have peers to lighten the load for content that the peers consumed?

                    Would something akin to the torrenting model be feasible for video streaming at scale? (Something like what peertube is doing)

                    2 votes
  2. PogChamp
    Link
    This is but one example in a long series of bad examples of how the internet is developing in the wrong direction towards closed off and tightly controlled ecosystems. Thank god Twitch came along...

    This is but one example in a long series of bad examples of how the internet is developing in the wrong direction towards closed off and tightly controlled ecosystems.

    Thank god Twitch came along and stole live streaming out from underneath their feet. A serious competitor is exactly what YouTube needs right now.

    5 votes