You should just download your favorite YouTube content and put it on a hard drive in your home
I increasingly am downloading YouTube videos I like - using ytdlp - and putting them on my NAS.
This is for several reasons:
- I do not trust that the internet will exist in its current form in several years. It's not that I think the internet will vanish or implode, but that I suspect that Google's relationship to users (and my relationship to Online) will change so much that I won't want to even look at YouTube or Online as much as I currently do. Maybe I'll just want to stay home and watch the hits like they're DVDs, or something.
- I do not trust that all these big tech companies will remain solvent. They are currently making a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructural investment so that software devs don't have to write regex anymore, and so that regular people don't have to learn how to use excel formulae. I'm not sure this is going to pay off and I'm not sure that it won't have splash damage on things like YouTube. It's definitely a kind of crazy wealthy excess that I can load up all these 90 minute videos and watch them whenever and wherever for free, huh? Will that last forever??
- I love some of these videos like they are DVDs.
- We have a NAS and it turned me into a data hoarder. Wow, there's a lot of data on YouTube!!
Anyway, I highly recommend doing it. I don't download EVERYTHING... only things that strike me as important. I sort of imagine that I am living in the post apocalpyse and that I am passing on the ancient texts to the young people of my fallen village. It's important for them to have access to videos about bicycling, or the Star Wars cruise, or how to use the bus in Los Angeles County. We need to recreate civilization after it's fallen, right? They might need this video about how to identify poison ivy where the two guys talk in very thick accents.
I strongly recommend that you also do this. When we have to recreate civilization, we can all get together and swap files.