Reminder to download any video at all important to you or anyone else.

Right now they're testing requiring DRM on TV clients (affects yt-dlp), but they can turn on DRM for all videos at any moment and few will even notice.

This is inevitable and coming soon. They need to stop other AI companies from scraping content, prevent AI viewer bots from watching ads, and stop AI from exploding youtube's storage costs. It won't even stop at DRM, but device identification (with Web Environment Integrity they're pushing).

But even more than that, it seems to be their strategy for reeesisting; make it so only pirate hackers can save a backup copy and then they can just remove any 'problematic' videos and edit history.