Same reason Microsoft or Adobe do not stop piracy. They want to create friction that pushes people to pay, but if they fully blocked adblockers then it could create an impetus for a competitor to become popular.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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And then you have companies like Google who are going all in on adblocking because that is their entire revenue stream.
Only enough to make the average user comply.
Again, enough friction.
The original post is about Google
You realize google owns youtube, right?
Well, you'd lose support for devices which can't handle software DRM playback, old YouTube clients installed on things like TVs which no longer get updated, if you want to support things that only get Widevine L3 support (most devices) you're not really going to move the needle since Widevine L3 had been broken since like forever, etc.
The main thing YouTube would gain in practice from such a move would be to get DMCA as a legal tool to crack down on people ripping YouTube videos, but that'd require some very significant resources invested into driving Legal processes against average consumers ripping videos, and the return on investment for that is almost certainly abysmal.
EDIT: I thought of two more reasons:
- Given the enormous scale of YouTube's transcoding pipeline, just adding in a DRM step into the mix will cost non-significant amounts of money
- All old content will remain non-DRM, because a re-transcode of the full YouTube catalog would cost an impossible amount of money
That would result in a mass exodus of their users and potentially result in their competitor popping up. Imagine the 2023 Reddit API controversy, but things going a lot worse for Reddit. Had Reddit taken a more extreme approach and made it entirely impossible to use any 3rd party apps instead of permitting workarounds for users to modify their apps, then they would've lost a lot of relevancy and would actually have suffered financially.
The smart way to do this would be to slowly implement anti-user practices over a long period of time, and let your corporate bootlickers gaslight the rest of the users into thinking that everything is fine and that they're only overreacting.
Except who wants to be YouTube?
Twitch only does streaming. Meta and TikTok only do short form video. Spotify's attempts to branch into video seem focused on podcasts and curated content. If YouTube were to erase from existence, I don't see a competitor getting made.
I don’t see a competitor getting made.
That's the neat part. Why make it if you could just buy it? All it takes is for a rich authoritarian asshat with too much money and a desire to push an agenda.
Kind of hard to buy something that doesn't exist.
The greedy little pigboy didn’t do that because the IPO was coming up too fast
That’s almost exactly what couchsurfing.com did. The fact they survived is kinda legendary
Compatibility with older clients. It will also break some embedded videos on other sites too.
If they do, they risk losing customers to other platforms. So far, they decided not to take that risk.
This... kills the site.
(Would see Vimeo or similar take over in about 5 months)
Vimeo is a video hosting platform but it isn't anywhere near YouTube replacement. It would be such a massive shift in their business model that trying to make it one would result a second dead site
There is no algorithm and search function, I don't even think there's a notification feature. Vimeo is mostly for artists to upload to and manually send the link
It is worse in that Vimeo makes money by charging creators to host their content instead of YouTube's model of it being free or a way to make money.
Didn't even think of that but yeah true. They aim for quality over quantity and it should stay that way
Things change, and full DRM would hasten that change. YT is a platform, they don't own the content.
That doesn't really have any impact on my point. They're similar in a few ways but it's like suggesting Wikipedia becomes an IMDB replacement, it would completely change the brand
I will not install DRM on my devices.
I imagine the fact that they allow the embedding of videos on other sites make it hard to restrict the playback to that degree. There seems to be a tipping point at which they'll work on breaking something, more than likely based on it's popularity When enough 3rd party frontends figured out background playback, they took the time to develop a way to break it. I think the same will happen when they feel too many people are circumventing their data scraping, ads or algorithms. They'll finally go all in but it's clear that they don't want to do that just yet.
I already just use screen capture recording to take videos in my desktop playing YouTube on a browser. Could they even stop that?
This is different, and doesn't address screen recording.
HDCP uses three systems:[5]
- Authentication prevents non-licensed devices from receiving content.
- Encryption of the data sent over DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, GVIF, or UDI interfaces prevents eavesdropping of information and man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Key revocation prevents devices that have been compromised and cloned from receiving data.
It would stop someone from playing DRM content to an unauthorized TV, but does not mention anything about screen recording your own device. There are some built in protections for preventing an application from being recorded but I have no doubt there are bypasses
Maybe I'm not following but this seems to be talking about applications communicating with hardware designed to be authorized to play.
How would a video playing on a browser like YouTube on my existing, old hardware be able to parse what's authorized? Short of making YouTube a program on my computer, how does it on a browser know what else I'm running?
For example: Netflix run on a browser, but it only sends you encrypted data, you need to enable your browser's DRM setting to decrypt this data. For HD content, it uses L1 Widevine that only works on Secure Boot enabled and TPM enabled Windows installation. So the decryption runs in the secure element, then data displayed on your screen. I'm no expert but its designed in a way that makes screen recorders unable to capture the video, resulting in a blackscreen.
If you try to play it on Linux, it reverts back to L3 Widevine which only for netflix they only allow SD content to run with L3 Widevine
Of course you can use an actual camera to record the screen, but then its a degraded image.
So Youtube could theoretically enforce L1 Widewine on every video, if they wanted to.
I guess I'm still not following how if I'm using say the nvidia geforce screen recording software which is capturing the display of my screen how the browser knows. Since the browsers has already gotten the image and displayed it and the recorder is recording the display instead of, intercepting (I suppose is the best word) the data before it is displayed.
I mean that's what DRM stops...
You can't record it, its just a blackscreen...
You can try it. Or Try asking a friend/relative to screenrecord their netflix... its just black
I mean unless you literally take out a camera to record it... but then the video quality degrades since you aren't gonna get a 1:1 from making a videotape of a screen.
It is often the graphics hardware blocking it in this case.. disabling hardware decoding in the browser may 'help', if your CPU can handle it (you can still use hardware encoding, tho)
From a quick google search, seems like you can disable hardware acceleration to record with OBS. Or you can use other dedicated software. And thats not even covering the bypasses that can likely be done on Linux
To add, you could always capture via the output video too, regardless of the DRM nonsense. Once it leaves the device in a format a display can present it, any device that can utilize that signal can record it.
There's always a million ways to skin the cat.
This is what i figured, so long as you can output to a generic non drm enabled monitor like a VGA, you can just feed it back into a digital capture device. It might take some work / bandwidth to do it much faster than 1:1 time, but it just needs one person to do it once. In likelihood there's a software way to do it perhaps with the right hacks to a display driver.
Nope
I mean that's what DRM stops...
....and nobody wants that.
Netflix being an application that is running on a TV seems like a very different situation than a video playing inside of a browser. How exactly would YouTube know or be able to stop screen recording short of forcing me to actively run a program?
The browsers implement the DRM protections. It will be black if you try to record.
idk how they do it, but browsers have DRM built right into it, you can play a stream from netflix but if you try to record it, its just a blackscreen...
Youtube could implement the same thing... I mean Google literally made Widewine
Also, apparantly you also need Secure Boot and TPM enabled to get the full HD content, otherwise it runs on Widewine L3 instead which only displays content in Standard Definition... not HD.
You can also run Netflix in a browser
Because they don't care if people download it? 99% of users will still go to watch the video on youtube because it's more convenient. I guess if they would stop ad-blockers first and then everyone who can't stand ads left and started torrenting or something they might try that but for now it just doesn't make sense.