YouTube Premium

Everyone just received this on the site subbed to YouTube and/or Spotify:

Hello
We are currently facing some issues with Spotify and some YouTube.
We were initially aiming to get everyone back online by Monday. Spotify had assured our group owners they would reactivate the newly defuncted family plans, but instead reneged on this commitment whilst refusing the reimburse them for the cancelled plans. In fact, some some group owners were encouraged to make further payments to see if the account restrictions were lifted only to find out they were not and lost out twice on making further payments. This stance is unreasonable and clearly abusive. Regarding YouTube, some plans were newly cancelled but we did notice that others were not which does suggest to us the path forward, as the uncancelled plans were set up differently to understand how the algorithms work selectively to cancel shared plans. With this knowledge, we will be resetting all family plans in a manner that allows to circumvent the algorithms for both YouTube and Spotify. We are aiming to fix this issue by the 15th August..
We have started crediting accounts that have been affected this month - if you have been affected but were removed from a group, we will still credit your account. This is a slow process. We also need to confer with the group owners that have unfortunately lost vast sums over the last 8 weeks since the issues manifested. We are very sorry for both group owners and members affected by this. What both Spotify and YouTube have done is unconscionable in many ways, their stance has been abusive, cancelling accounts with no prior warning offering no refund, goading group owners to spend more funds only to refuse to reactivate the accounts. All this is, of course, a concerted efforts by those platforms to ensure everyone pays for individual subscriptions. But this is an unsustainable stance because said subscriptions are simply too expensive with prices rising constantly, balancing multiple subscriptions can have costs mounting up, leading to many having to decide which subscriptions to cancel or preserve or go without, and GO5050 remains dedicated to help defray those costs through sharing
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I can see why they are playing the victim but in reality what they are doing is ultimately breaching the terms of service/contract and Youtube will have the right to terminate it. The issue of refunds (or lack of) is more interesting, in thoery if you breached the contract, the other party could be liable for compensation, particularly as what these family groups are doing could be considered fraud. Misrepresentation is fraud, very low level fraud mind but it is still fruad.

I can't see what Spotify or YouTube is any different to what Netflix does in this regard, at the end of the day, a 'family plan' isn't intended for 6 randoms to group together and form a family to get a cheaper subscription. It's intended to be for people living in the same household.

They can complain that individual subscriptions are too expensive but at the end of the day, the internet isn't 'free', it costs real money and consuming the service is entirely optional. The reality is, the business will charge as much as the market will bare for such a service.

I am deliberately playing devils advocate here, but lets not kid ourselves that fake family groups are legitmate.
 
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b0rn2sk8 said:
I can see why they are playing the victim but in reality what they are doing is ultimately breaching the terms of service/contract and Youtube will have the right to terminate it. The issue of refunds (or lack of) is more interesting, in thoery if you breached the contract, the other party could be liable for compensation, particularly as what these family groups are doing could be considered fraud. Misrepresentation is fraud, very low level fraud mind but it is still fruad.

I can't see what Spotify or YouTube is any different to what Netflix does in this regard, at the end of the day, a 'family plan' isn't intended for 6 randoms to group together and form a family to get a cheaper subscription. It's intended to be for people living in the same household.

They can complain that individual subscriptions are too expensive but at the end of the day, the internet isn't 'free', it costs real money and consuming the service is entirely optional. The reality is, the business will charge as much as the market will bare for such a service.

I am deliberately playing devils advocate here, but lets not kid ourselves that fake family groups are legitmate.
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By definition. A family is a family member of yours and last I checked. Not every family member lives in the same household...
They should instead rename the plan to something like household plan instead....

It's not actually a family plan
 
jonneymendoza said:
By definition. A family is a family member of yours and last I checked. Not every family member lives in the same household...
They should instead rename the plan to something like household plan instead....

It's not actually a family plan
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The name isn't that relivent, its intention.

To quote the text on the Youtube website right next to the 'Get a Family Plan' button:
Family accounts must reside at the same residential address. Recurring billing.
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It's pretty clear whats it's meant to be...
 
I've just had an email about YouTube updating their terms for Premium.

Noting the third point about which country you should be in and how we all love to chase them around the world.

We are making these changes to improve clarity and transparency regarding your subscription, including:

  • Clarifying our plan types.
  • Explaining our policies on promotional offers and accepted payment methods.
  • Clarifying that your subscription access should be predominantly from the country where you signed up.
  • Providing additional explanations and clarifications on our subscription policies.
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SmartTube on TV is what Youtube Premium should be - no ads of course, but also major creators own sponsor segments / self-promotion / credit waffle is quickly ID'd and auto-skips. Plus can see the dislike count once again :D

Only downside is sometimes the audio crackles with SmartTube on my TV, though you do have the option to fiddle with bitrate / compression method type specifically for audio - some true power user stuff.
 
Beans on toast Dave said:
is that going to stop the game or are people going to still try and get round it. although i guess its account banning in the future?
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I've given up trying different countries as I kept getting the error that my card was not from the destination country with multiple cards, I'm now using sharingful and joined someone's family instead, wonder how long this will last before they crack down on that method next. But at least I'm now only paying £4.60.
 
jonneymendoza said:
People also sometimes use tailscale which is a vpn mesh and at home, all my devices have different ip so to speak despite being connected to my lan
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What is the point of this? Surely having a VPN on all the time removes any benefits of privacy or avoiding identifiability. So besides location, what is the purpose?
 
LuckyBenski said:
What is the point of this? Surely having a VPN on all the time removes any benefits of privacy or avoiding identifiability. So besides location, what is the purpose?
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So I can securely access my nas and any other server stuff when I'm away from home.

You can also securely sync and connect each device together as well.

Look it up. Tailscale is soo good!
 
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