The reason why yt makes 4k behind a paywall because streaming in that resolution hurts their revenue, now does watching in newpipe do the same or I’ll just drain my battery faster
In newpipe you are still using yt servers so I guess the answer is yes (since you are leeching bandwidth without watching ads)
You are not just draining your battery tho, you are actually enjoying higher quality content :)
There aren’t currently enough people using tools like NewPipe for you watching in 4K to hurt YouTube’s revenue, which I’d say is what they deserve anyway. Also, it’s not like they’ll really notice.
Besides, exactly how would it hurt their revenue?
You don’t watch the ads, you don’t get tracked besides some obvious IP tracking. These two things are the whole point Google maintains the service, you know
I know, but as I understand it, few enough people actually use these alternatives that it doesn’t really matter.
I disagree: enough people have use youtube-dl and Invidious so Youtube’s legal team actually bothered to reach out to those projects. Let’s take a look at some stats:
- Invidious has 11k stars on their GitHub page https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
- NewPipe has 24k stars https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
- FreeTube (desktop app for Youtube that could either use Invidious API or scrape Youtube itself) has 7k stars https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
- Piped has 4k stars https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
- Piped also gives some stats about its userbase here https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances — over 173 thousands of registered users on the main instance!
- youtube-dl is one of the most starred projects on Github
- And all of the projects above have lots of forks
Any stream / download is costing something.
