[Mefix]

I have YouTube premium and on chrome, because I have ublock installed, it doesn't even load videos. Just a big black screen. My regular habit of opening up a few videos in the background tabs is completely diminished into closing all my picks just because I cant be bothered to open the links in firefox. You'd think youtube wouldn't be that aggressive towards paying subscribers, but the feel is they REALLY don't want to load any content for you.

Another funny thing for premium subscribers is when their ultra low bitrate 1080p videos have an enchanted bitrate option available to subscribers, you have to enable it manually every time instead of being a convenient feature.

My thinking is that in their pursuance of optimization lead them to overserve locally cached videos as priority to save on bandwidth, it's like internet providers are demanding more of them and google's projections for growth show a total collapse of the platform in some not-too-distaint future.

[mvdtnz]

Uhh this is not a normal situation for Chrome / uBlock users. I use Chrome and uBlock as do hundreds of thousands of other people and Youtube videos load just fine.

[Izkata]

They mentioned background tabs: I see it in Firefox (with uBlock) when it's a tab I've had sitting in the background for hours. Usually the only fix is to copy the URL and reopen it in a few tab, refreshing doesn't work when it gets into this state.

It feels like a weird combination of caching, some key expiring, and how YouTube doesn't finish loading the video until you view the tab.