I agree with everything that's already been said in this thread, but I've noticed one thing that hasn't been discussed at all.
I live in a rural area where network connectivity is poor at worst and intermittent at best. I spent years watching Rogan on YouTube with nothing but network problems. Watching Rogan was a chore in the previous scenario, and YouTube did not make it easy.
Once Rogan moved to Spotify, I never had a single problem with network connectivity. I could use the app to seamlessly switch between audio and video, and it was easy to both find and browse previous podcasts and quickly queue them up to play or watch. I could never do this before in a poor connectivity environment, but Spotify made all of this possible.
Youtube automatically switches to the lowest bitrate if it detects a slow network. Was it still too slow at 360p?
I used NewPipe to download the YT vids ahead of time. It has the option to download only the audio streams, so a lot of bandwidth can be saved that way as well.
I should note, I was not using the YouTube app, I was using the Safari browser on my iPhone all these years. To me, it seemed like a buffering problem, even at 360p. For whatever reason, Spotify loads immediately (or at worst, within five seconds) and gives me the best experience. Thanks for the tip about NewPipe.
I live in a rural area where network connectivity is poor at worst and intermittent at best. I spent years watching Rogan on YouTube with nothing but network problems. Watching Rogan was a chore in the previous scenario, and YouTube did not make it easy.
Once Rogan moved to Spotify, I never had a single problem with network connectivity. I could use the app to seamlessly switch between audio and video, and it was easy to both find and browse previous podcasts and quickly queue them up to play or watch. I could never do this before in a poor connectivity environment, but Spotify made all of this possible.