Why can youtube not just give a micropayments backed API? Just charge a few cents per video download and be done with it.

eitau_1 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

meanwhile Youtubers: a penny per view would be 10x what Youtube pays us

	▲	kccqzy 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The YouTube RPM (revenue per mille) strongly depends on the location of the audience and the topic of the video. It could be anywhere from $0.5 to $20. That 10x figure could very well be true for that YouTuber, but it's also true that other YouTubers already earn more than a penny per view.

3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

They do. It's called YouTube Premium.

yreg 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not though. You can't download an mp4 to use however you wish with YouTube Premium. And definitely not via an API.

None of that was mentioned in the comment?

	▲	exe34 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		did you miss the word "API"? it was there.

pmdr 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

AFAIK Premium allows you to download to persistent browser storage. But is it DRM-free/open or usable format?

It's DRM-ed and somewhat broken.

	▲	raphman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		According to [1], the downloaded video is AES-encrypted. Decryption key is stored locally in an IndexDB. I tried building a Python script using plyvel [2], a Python module for reading IndexDB/LevelDB, some time ago but IIRC, it had trouble reading the Chrome DB. Maybe Google's dfindexeddb [3] works. I didn't try it, however. [1] https://github.com/Marsel-marsel/youtube-premium-video-downl... [2] https://github.com/wbolster/plyvel [3] https://github.com/google/dfindexeddb