The Status Quo
Network effects and corporate enshittification.
Longform video is dominated by Youtube, with smaller players holding on to various niches. Live streaming and shortform are dominated by Twitch and TikTok, but are beyond the scope of consideration.
If you want to be a serious creator in this space you cannot afford to ignore Youtube, no matter how you feel about the platform, its business model, and its moderation practices. Its use is virtually mandatory for success.
Youtube is driven by network effects, as you have to put your content where the audience is, and if you want to watch videos you have to go to where they are uploaded.
With network effects in place, extractive enshittification ensues. In fact, providing the experience we all had in the past was never the plan, as that experience was operating at a loss the entire time. The result is that Youtube is, seemingly, trying to annoy people into buying premium.
Advertising and Subscriptions
Where is the option to purchase?
The advertising model makes the viewer a product to be sold to advertisers. For advertising to be maximally effective, and thus worth more money, as much information as possible has to be collected about the viewer. Your privacy is not a concern in the advertising business.
The subscription model makes you a customer. The catch is that you do not own anything; you are simply renting access. The more curious observation is that you pay a fixed amount for a variable amount of the product. In essence, a subscription model is more profitable for the company when you make less use of it. Underutilization is the fundamental business model of subscriptions. Together with "subscription fatigue", which limits how many subscriptions people have at the same time, it creates a winner-takes-all market.
Youtube has a fundamental problem in its offerings because it offers both advertising and subscriptions. Who are the most valuable viewers to advertise to? It is those who prove their willingness to pay. Unfortunately, those people are ones who will not be served ads because "no ads" is what they are paying for. This situation is sustainable because Alphabet (Google) is the king of advertising, so they remain the best option for advertisers.
Both advertising and subscriptions are anti-customer business models.
Advertising models lead to ad-blocker battles between the platform and the viewers. It also leads to very strict rules for creators regarding video content in the name of being "advertiser friendly". Creators censor their speech with alternative terms, e.g. "unalive" instead of "kill" to avoid triggering the detection algorithm. This significantly affects the content, but far more egregious is that advertisers don't play by the same rules, which poses the question of who the real customers are. It is not you. You're the product.
Subscriptions on the other hand makes you rent access, barring you from any and all ownership. Subscription models lead to extreme DRM measures, which hampers user experience in the pursuit of preventing independence from the platform. The subscription model is contingent on control, not customer satisfaction.
Why Ownership Matters
You get to keep what you paid for.
In short, ownership means control. A lack of ownership means a lack of control.
When you own something you decide what to do with it and what happens to it. When you do not own something those rights are reserved by someone else.
Under the subscription model you do not own anything at all, and you're subject to the will of those who do. You're renting access, and when the access is cut you lose access to everything you had while you were paying. This is similar to renting vs owning your home.
Transactional models have a similar strategy, regardless of whether it is the advertising model or the OwnStream model. DRM can be used to require you to repeat the transaction every time you want to access the data.
This is why OwnStream takes the stance of "downloading is owning". No DRM. No digital locks. No measures designed to restrict your right to control the software and data on your machine. If you want to download a video for the purposes of keeping it, then it should be trivial to do so.
Beyond the Data
Ownership is not limited to rejecting DRM. Ownership also means the right to compute.
OwnStream must provide a client with a good experience that serves most users well. What OwnStream cannot do is provide the optimal experience for every demographic.
The OwnStream model does not require taking away your freedoms, so you can use any client that is available. Want one that has a different interface? Perhaps optimized for a different way of using the platform? Maybe one that is built around a different input modality, like voice commands? Maybe one that has more sophisticated features for local caching to save money? You can do that. No limits.
Ownership for Creators
Treating creators as equals.
The concept of ownership must be understood in a broader sense than usual. What it means to own a thing is well understood, as is the concept of the ownership of intellectual property. OwnStream extends ownership reasoning to owning the right to monetization.
While owning the right to monetization is ideological rhetoric, which requires legal implementation, the point remains the same. Monetization should not be something the platform can decide. If the platform is fine with showing the video to the viewers, then shouldn't the creator be entitled to monetization? They definitely should. OwnStream respects the right to monetization.