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‘I want to cancel’: YouTube Premium quietly hikes its US prices for the first time in three years, forcing many users to consider the unthinkable (www.techradar.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 14 points 7 months ago (8 children)

I I received the email today telling me that they were going to raise the price of my family plan by $4 per month. I'm guessing that their costs have not increased in any way, and probably have decreased. I assume it's just another squeeze tactic from the company that used to not be evil.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I imagine costs have increased (more expensive server components due to ai shortages, more users to stream to, ever-increasing storage for the unthinkable amount of video that gets uploaded to YouTube nonstop). I imagine Google going all in on ai (infinite negative money glitch) costs a lot and they're trying to cover the costs elsewhere so the investor report doesn't look so bad and spook stockholders into selling. I'd keep an eye on other Google services to see if their prices also go up over the coming months.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

    I think its likely the codex price hike, not Ai

    Most of their servers are processing and multiencoding with h264/h265, and even if people are moving away from that for av1 they have such a massive platform that they still have to utilize it even when most have moved on

    Ill rerespond to this to a link to exactly what im talking about if I remember

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    That only applies to new contracts from what I heard, not to existing contracts. Google certainly has a long term contract that wouldn't be affected by the increased royalties for new H.264 contracts.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Oh, come now... You really telling me you think they or any other multi-billion dollar corp won't frontload the costs and pocket the difference?

    Or 'ease' the price increase in over a few quarters so that its not met with as harsh of backlash?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Not defending Google, but how many employees do they have? Did they all get raises this year? I bet license deals from the music industry probably went up too. (No proof but assuming)

    But I agree 100%, they are without a doubt no longer following "don't be evil". But it's disingenuous to believe they're annual costs are not increasing along with literally everything else.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I wasn't being disingenuous and I just validated my assumptions.

    The cost of compute per million instructions has continued to decrease. The cost of storage on HDD has also continued to decrease, albeit more slowly. The cost of NAND storage has increased due to the supply crunch that Google helped create. Average pay at Google has gone up 5% over the past two years, but this is offset at least in part by mass layoffs. License fees for music have remained stagnant.

    While a lot of those things are arguable one way or another, depending on whose numbers you look at and what specific details you want to focus on, one thing is not. Google's profits have nearly doubled in the past 3 years. There is no reason for a price increase beyond corporate greed.

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