'YouTube on connected (smart) televisions is adding 30-second "non-skips." These unskippable ads will appear on YouTube Select content, which is what the company deems to be the top videos. This longer format allows marketers to "use existing assets in front of the most-streamed content."'
'The second big announcement are ads that appear "when people pause a video." What you’re watching will shrink and an advertisement will appear next to that window. In the example provided, we see an "Ad" that’s labeled with some text and a QR code. There’s a "Dismiss" button at the bottom to presumably return to the normal fullscreen pause screen, or you can just hit play again to resume.'
There was a video ad many many years ago (2004 or older) that showed a future with strict authentication and access controls ... where employee has to "submit a DNA sample to continue" when they log into a workstation.
The ad shows a bald man first running his hand over a completely bald head deviod of any hair, then opening a couple of buttons of his shirt only to find his chest is also completely hairless (presumably already used for previous logins) then he finally sighs and starts to unzip ... ad cuts to black.
I have never been able to locate this again nor recollect what product / service / brand the ad was for. It was probably some cybersecurity or consulting firm.
Reminds me of a more mundane version in an excellent sci-fi TV series, Incorporated (cancelled for $deity knows why, while lesser series continued). IIRC, it featured login authorization by DNA sample, with a neat-looking circular device that would stick a needle in your finger to draw blood.
Another interesting concept from that show was NDAs being treated quite literally - per the agreement, if you're to quit or get fired, you'll be put in a device that wipes all covered corporate secrets from your memory. The process wasn't perfect, and could result in a total memory wipe, removing all your memories from the employment period. Allegedly. It's not like there are people who remember it happening.
So looking forward to pausing a video on the TV to answer the phone / talk to someone in the room, only for said TV to start blaring an advert at a stupid volume, as I assume the horrible audio level mixing on regular TV will be present here.
Don't you worry. Most (all?) companies in smart TV space are also making their own mobile phones, so of course they'll offer you a special service that mutes the ads when it detects you're close to the TV and are picking up a phone call.
There is no problem adtech creates, that cannot be solved by more invasive telemetry.
> so of course they'll offer you a special service that mutes the ads when it detects you're close to the TV and are picking up a phone call.
But only when YOUR phone gets the call.
Also the TV won't come with a remote. You'll be expected to pair with your phone using an app that spies on everything. And if you want other users to be able to control the TV with their phones, well, that's gonna cost you extra on a monthly subscription. But hey, that's what the "family" plan is for!
EDIT: Just you wait. They'll add "notification" support to TVs, and next thing you know, your TV will be turning itself on to display ads when you're not even watching it.
> and next thing you know, your TV will be turning itself on to display ads when you're not even watching it.
Oh no no, that would be wasting advertiser money. Not fair. The opposite will happen - the TV will come equipped with a suite of sensors, including "structured light" cameras, which, combined with telemetry from the TV app on your phone, will allow the TV to power down the screen when no one is looking at it, and power down the speakers when no one is within earshot.
This will be advertised as eco-aware, planet-and-wallet-saving Intelligent Smart feature.
As a person with a low tolerance for ads, I work hard to avoid them in all contexts. So it's absolutely wild to me what people will put up with. There seems to be some sort of unholy alliance between "number must go up" and "cooking the frog slowly" that means things are going to keep getting worse. I figure there must be a breaking point somewhere, but I would have expected it to come years ago, so I genuinely wonder how bad it can get.
Half the time when I pause a video, it's to have a better look at something on the screen. The related videos that pop up on pause are annoying enough, but at least I can close that panel.
I mean, obviously more ads are annoying, but I don't see how this is functionally worse than TV ads. You can't skip those either, and unlike with YouTube there's not even an option to pay to get rid of them.
1) people use youtube to not have to see TV ads
2) tv ads of today are wildly different that TV ads of years ago; they (ads) are simply getting more aggressive every year
3) electronic DRMs means an AD company knows exactly which microseconds were watched and by whom; many folks do not want to be tracked like that (and more folks simply "dont care" and offer "logic" along the lines "everybody poops, who cares if they know when i go poop", ect
Then the good news is they still can by paying for YouTube Premium. The service has to be paid for somehow and Google gives you two choices, your eyeballs or a subscription.
We are talking about YouTube not TV. If you pay for YouTube Premium Google doesn't inject any ads. If the videos of the independent creator you chose to watch on YouTube includes sponsored content that is an issue to raise with the creator not Google.
And with LLMs we also have the ability to automatically write it... the background running adblocking process in the future and just going to be AI battlegrounds
Someone really needs to make the Sonarr equivalent for YouTube (or maybe it already exists) where you plug in your list of subscriptions and it just automatically downloads them and adds them to Plex/Jellyfin. Sidestep this bullshit entirely.
YouTube is a lot like reddit in that, if you're curating your subscriptions, there's a lot of good and worthwhile stuff to be found, but if you're just taking the default stuff that the site pushes to you, you're going to be mired in absolute garbage non-stop.
Tubesync? I actually just tried this out a few days ago and it didn't appear to work out of the box - I need to play with its knobs and switches to figure out why it isn't indexing the channels I fed it.
In any case according to the instructions on the tin it should work.
Why give YouTube money? They make plenty off Premium, ads, and user data and still do shit like this. Not to mention the fact that they censor legal content, their algos have gotten worse, they broke search, they manually select most of the trending tab, false DMCAs get accepted constantly, and what little algos do work snuff out small channels who struggle to reach viewers like me because I keep getting recommended the same 5 videos regardless of what I watch.
Tl;dr fuck YouTube I genuinely hope LBRY or Peertube take its place sooner rather than later.
Because youtube is probably one of the most expensive sites on the net to run, it's also one of the most useful sites on the net full stop.
If ads are the problem, google provides a solution in Youtube Premium, a solution I should add that I frequently hear people on HN begging for e.g. "Don't make me deal with ads, let me just pay for it".
When the rubber meets the road though, people won't actually pay to remove ads, they, like you, will come up with any number of excuses to avoid doing so.
> If ads are the problem, google provides a solution in Youtube Premium, a solution I should add that I frequently hear people on HN begging for e.g. "Don't make me deal with ads, let me just pay for it".
Does it really work like that? I honestly don't know, I haven't tried - because I don't trust it, not after having its advert endlessly shoved in my face.
Would you trust a gangster to leave you alone if you agree to their protection racket? Why should I believe a company that engages in deeply immoral, antisocial activities, when they say that I can be spared from it if only I give them a bit of my money every month?
For as long as uBlock Origin and yt-dlp work, or any of their current and future alternatives work, I will not subscribe to YouTube Premium. I'll happily pay 2x that to uBO, though (if Gorhill was accepting donations), because with respect to YouTube, on top of not having ads, it gives me following extra features:
- Really no ads. Except the ones included by "content creators" themselves (one of these days I'll install SponsorBlock).
- Less tracking. Does YouTube Premium make Google track you less? Didn't think so.
- Less of the obnoxious UI "improvements". uBO also makes it easy to have some minimal control of my YouTube experience, by means like letting me delete or forever block UI clutter that I personally find annoying.
- Same and more benefits for embedded YouTube videos, as well as the whole web.
Wake me up when Google actually promises to not do user-hostile things in Premium, and when their word is actually worth anything.
Youtube is one of the most expensive sites because they chose to model their infustructure this way. Same reason facebook needs such massive servers. It wants control of the data.
Youtube could be re-done in a peer-to-peer format a la torrents. You subscribe to someone and watch their videos you're also re-uploading to others. Tada, massive server problems disapear.
Lol your peer will run 100% CPU whenever a video is requested on basic hardware. Live transcoding, subtitles, tagging. Every time a video is published your system becomes hugged to death. Nobody is able to watch videos normally unless there is some decent spread.
Nah end users don't want to have this problematic user experience.
Sending subtitles is sending a text file, not some monumental task. Even a cpu version of whisper only needs to be run once (and can be done by the uploader).
Not all devices need to do the same amount of work. Not all the work needs to happen when the screen is on and on battery power.
End users also don’t want to be bombarded with ads and spied on for the privilege of being bombarded with them.
No, YouTube DOESN’T provide a complete solution to ads. Once I pay for premium, I still have to sit through 2 -4 sponsor reads per video for many channels I follow. I know that’s not entirely on YouTube, but that doesn’t matter to me as a consumer. I pay, and ads are still there. That’s a no go for me.
Excuses. With premium you could install sponsor block and legitimately say you've paid for the content. Youtube would be happy because they don't care that you skip sponsor reads, the creator would be happy because they got your revenue from premium AND the sponsor can't tell you skipped so even they don't care.
In other words win, win, win.
But I'm assuming this still isn't enough for you to pay because as evidenced by this thread there is always some excuse why it's not possible to pay for the content watched while at the same time blocking ads.
So my genuine grievances with a platform are “excuses” for not giving them my hard-earned cash? Maybe you need to re-evaluate your relationship with YouTube.
I won’t give them my money nor time because on every level I find them a disgusting business. I only put up with them due to the fact that they are, unfortunately, the only major player in town with many content creators I enjoy. I wish they would move to FOSS solutions, but unfortunately adoption is slow amongst non-tech channels. Instead, I use RSS and Invidious to interface with the content I enjoy in a way far superior to YouTube’s own offerings, all for free. And thus I can take the money I save from Premium and give it to creators directly via donation services/merch.
If you believe its somehow “worth it” to support a multibillion company that is backed by an even larger corporation who has made it clear time and time again they don’t care about their creators, then by all means go ahead, but your assessment that these are “excuses” to “avoid” paying for a service I don’t require is detached from reality on every level.
If they are a "disgusting company" that "doesn't care about their creators" why are you still utilizing it!
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Its incredibly disingenuous to say all this, then go on to watch hours of YouTube a week.. Sounds like mental gymnastics to justify your continued enjoyment of their platform while sticking it to them.
I dislike Google, but damn sure I'm paying for youtube premium. I swear under my breath every month when they charge my card, but at the end of the day the value is there for me and my family, not sure what else to say....
I have my cake and eat it too. No ads, all the content creators I enjoy, I actually get notified of new uploads, and none of YouTube’s garbage. I get an even better experience than YT Premium for free, no ads included. It’s better for the creators I enjoy as well, because I pay even more than Premium in Patreons every month.
And if you bothered to read anything I said, you’d understand why I put up with YouTube. Content creators I enjoy haven’t adopted other, superior platforms. More and more swap to alternatives like LBRY, which is great, but unfortunately not enough to completely replace it. Though I never did say I watched “hours of YouTube a week”, in fact its increasingly losing prevalence in my life as I return to reading books.
Additionally, if you supposedly “dislike” Google, than why are you supporting them? Why are you defending the solution to a problem they themselves created? If I’m playing “mental gymnastics”, then it sounds like you’re training for the mental olympics with how far you’re defending your own purchasing habits.
You need to cut out the abusive lover that is YouTube out of your life, they’re genuinely not worth it. You can do better.
YouTube’s ad platform had a bug in it yesterday that looped the new Little Mermaid ad through most of the 4th quarter of an NBA playoff game, and I haven’t seen much from them about it.
Twitter was on fire about it, so I don’t think it was just me.
Cable style commercials are ideal for me, out of all the possible choices. I have full control over the DVR video stream, nothing is unskippable.
Streaming technology had to be temporarily superior in order to win adoption, but now that it's mature it will only evolve in the direction of taking away control and privacy from viewers.
And if I'm watching live and can't skip ads, I prefer a full 3-minute break at a predictable cadence to more random and frequent 10-30 second interruptions. I have time to get up and do something, or else mute and browse on my phone for a few minutes.
> The second big announcement are ads that appear “when people pause a video.” What you’re watching will shrink and an advertisement will appear next to that window. In the example provided, we see an “Ad” that’s labeled with some text and a QR code.
An ad strategy inspired by pirate soccer streaming websites. What's next, a "Close Ad" button that moves a few pixels away when you try to click it?
No there's an 'X' in the usual close ad button spot but its just part of the picture/video. The real close button is camouflaged with the contents and hidden in a random sot.
Or maybe consider this is a somewhat necessary evil for the service provided (free HD streaming of infinite amounts of video that also rewards creators in the most sustainable fashion for any social media platform). Bandwidth, storage and monetization isn’t free. What exactly do you want? A service that will spend their money to deliver arbitrary HD video on demand and lose money?
YouTube premium exists, costs less than Netflix and provides infinitely more value for the money at this point. Every single person I nonconsensually forced YouTube premium on has come back to thank me for doing so. The last time people were happy i techno-assaulted them was when I introduced them all to Dropbox a decade back.
> Or maybe consider this is a somewhat necessary evil for the service provided
No.
Monetisation is needed, going to extremes is not. The quest for infinite growth has created these extremes, it is indeed to blame. User # is exhausted, now it's time for more $ per user. Profitability is not enough, more money needs to be made, and when imagination is lacking to find more business areas, you simply fuck up the users or customers of your products which have the biggest lock-in.
> What exactly do you want? A service that will spend their money to deliver arbitrary HD video on demand and lose money?
I'd probably want options instead of a singular proprietary garden, antithetical to the open web, where all content is hosted.
Just one example: I'd be fine with a service that respected my time and just had a list of sponsored links associated with the content of the video, but everything was in 480p-720p. Maybe that wouldn't be ideal for everyone, but that's how the web was supposed to work: lots of approaches, only unified by consensus-derived protocols.
I’m ok giving Google my money/data in exchange of this service. However they constantly increase it service over time : more functions, better quality, higher fps while I don’t need neither want it.
Nothing wrong with higher bandwidth enthusiasts but I won’t pay or see ads “for them”.
Google, give me a YT with price/ads adapting to the data consumption (plus some fix extra if needed), I’ll encourage everyone around me consuming “the right video with the right ad”
I've seen people on here complain about YouTube's ads without any will to consider the need to buy premium at all.
However this is different, this is going to absolute extremes. Pause screen ads is just absolutely ridiculous. This is about inching out every last little bit of engagement from the user as possible.
I wouldn't say necessary, but I also don't think it's unreasonable. They're simply doing what is in their interest to do.
YouTube generated about $30 billion in revenue last year. Google don't break out their operating or net numbers, but I'd be pretty confident that they are already quite profitable.
What is reasonably apparent though, is that their user growth is flattening [1], and thus their revenue also [2].
Trying to increase ARPU is the obvious move, as it was with search.
But you have to be logged in. I often pop into an incognito window to watch a video that I don't want YouTube to recommend things related to, which seems to work. YouTube Premium prevents that, right?
I've found that just removing the video from my watch history after I watch it side steps this issue entirely. Frankly, seems a bit easier than opening a whole incognito window and being forced to watch ads anyways.
It's hardly an ordeal to press ctrl-shift-n, or right-click and "Open link in incognito window". There are no ads with uBlock Origin allowed in incognito windows. There is no need to worry about manually maintaining watch history either.
Fair point, but I'm already paying for YT Premium and on mobile switching to an Incognito tab would be a lot more work. I tend to watch a lot more YT content on mobile like during my commute on the ferry. On desktop definitely agree though!
Turn off YouTube history tracking. Then subscribe a lot to content you like. Then ignore the front page, and just scroll your subscriptions. The algorithm is really just candy, you are much better just curating your subscription list. You will get recommendations from end the end of videos.
I beg to differ, in my particular case, YouTube has by far the best calibrated algorithm I've been exposed to
I've been consistently exposed to great creators even if they have low viewcounts, and they know which creators I'm subscribed I don't watch at upload time vs which ones I do
I do keep an eye on what do I signal engagement to, so I guess It's not a perfect sample, but still
And it seems they're making every effort to drive you crazy if you don't subscribe to premium.
Hulu is doing something similar using crazy loud ads on their non-premium subscription. Searching their support forums for "ads too loud" brings up threads going back multiple years. I thought this practice was illegal, but perhaps there is a loophole when it comes to streaming content?
Spotify mastered this a decade ago. They could detect when your PC volume was muted during an ad. They'd pause the ad and resume it once the mute was turned off.
> TV has Ads, and then you pay for Cable and you still get ads.
Yup, and Cable was the YouTube Premium of TV back in the day. Advertising is cancer - it slowly consumes every communication medium it touches.
Remember: by paying to remove ads, you self-identify as someone who has disposable income and is willing to spend it, making you the prime target for advertisers. This money isn't going to be left on the table to waste forever.
That's an unhelpful feeling. With YouTube, you're given a clear choice, of which you're free to choose from: Premium, or free tier. By paying for Premium, you're rewarding the Premium offering, and by using the free tier, you're contributing to the free tier. So by paying, you're rewarding good behavior, which is providing the content as-is for a price.
I totally agree. Over time it has became one of our family's most consistently used streaming services. Seeing this actually reminded me that we were using premium (I had forgotten about the free option). The subscription also includes Youtube Music (which is a passable replacement for Spotify).
I wish youtube would have a "watch profile" feature disconnected or as a subset of the account so I can have recommended feeds based on watch history of my "watch profile" as well as a subscriptions
For example I have mutiple YT accounts, that I use for topical things, like one for Technology, one for current events / news, one for live streams, and one for political.
I would need 2 or 3 Premium subscriptions, when all I really want is to have different subscription feeds that are contextual
I like to have Long plays of old retro video games playing on my TV in the background while I work, almost like a fancier screensaver, so YouTube premium has been a godsend.
There's a hell of a lot of money it takes to maintain a content hosting infrastructure as massive as YouTube, so I always shake my head when people naively expect they should get something like that for completely free.
It probably won't be easy to convince people to pay for something that was previously free.
Then again, I could have said the same about many YouTube changes in recent years - that it will be difficult to convince people to like the changes. They were all unpopular and the platform keeps going strong.
It’s going to be funny to see if the rest of the world adapts to the stupid amount of ads beeing shown on american TV, now that youtube seems to embrace that road (.)
My guess is they won’t, and youtube will collapse. But it may take some time..
(.) I vividly remember my first attempt at watching a movie on public tv in the US, 20 years ago. The movie was cut because there was so many ads that the total length of the movie would have occupied the whole afternoon. so they simply removed random scenes, and as a result, the story didn’t make any sense at all.
I expect Youtube to thrive and grab some of the revenue that cable/satellite TV and other companies in the media delivery chain used to.
Various pricing tiers would segment the customers based on their ability and willingness to pay. Pay $100 per month to avoid all ads, pay $50 for some ads, pay $0 for all ads. And then throw in family/individual discounts and music, or Google Drive/Gmail bundles, etc.
> It’s going to be funny to see if the rest of the world adapts to the stupid amount of ads beeing shown on american TV, now that youtube seems to embrace that road (.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "rest of the world".
If you mean broadcast tv services in the rest of the world, they already have 30 second TV commercials. (They're actually the norm.)
If you mean other streaming services, Hulu, Peacock, Pluto, Paramount+ etc all already have 30 second non-skippable ads.
I also seem to get ads on TV if I cast on it from a different account. Both the accounts in question have premium, so it seems Google has also forced ads on casting by non-primary users.
Does anyone else face same issue ?
Honestly expect this to only get worse as a Premium user. Now its ads on cast, next it’ll be a 15s ad every video, and so on and so forth till you’re forced to watch 1m ads per video. And it’ll absolutely cost more too.
Us non-Premium users? Probably unskippable 5m before, during, and after.
For this to work they would need to really improve the recommendation algorithm by a lot! E.g. if I knew that I had a couple of high quality videos lined up to watch this evening, I might tolerate a couple of minutes of ads in between. But I would not tolerate them between random short trash videos... I would just watch a lot less Youtube then (which would maybe be a good thing tbh).
"Did you know Nova Scotia has over 13,000 miles of coastline? Wanna bet?"
I have seen that same damn ad 1000's of times over the last few months while watching Picard in the Paramount LG TV app -- it's usually played twice, back to back to fill a 60 second slot ... I see it at every ad break. What is the point? That's why I have an adblocker for Y-T.
It appears to be to promote Tourism in Nova Scotia. So aside from pissing me off by showing me the same ad literally 100's of times, incl multiple times in a row, I assume they're also ripping off the taxpayers of Nova Scotia by charging them over and over for the same ad impression?
It's really an indictment on the very sad state of ads on streaming platforms, if someone like Paramount or YouTube wants to "force" ads, then at least do it properly! I actually don't mind when a Y-T content-creator wants to pitch (not South but ...)-VPN or whatever, because at least they make a effort to tell my why it's so great and maybe there's a discount code that actually might be interesting to me.
Well I guess we're in the worst timeline where Susan Wojcieki's hand-trained goon somehow manages to have worse ideas about how to run youtube than she did.
Yeah, youtube is the new boobtube and it's become somewhat of a mild addiction for me. Maybe if I start seeing these 30 second unskippables it will help in the cure. There are so many more productive things to be doing than watching youtube.
I bought a "tiny PC", installed Kubuntu on it, bought a USB remote control and used KDE's insane configurability to set it up to look and feel like a TV OS in order to turn my "smart" TV into a "dumb" one. One where I can watch YouTube in a full-screened web browser with an ad blocker installed.
Yeah, I plugged a NUC into my TV, installed Pop OS on it, and got a Pepper Jobs USB gyro-remote to control it, and it instantly upgraded my living room.
I previously used my PS4 for watching everything, but having a full desktop OS is just way better: I can browse the web on my TV, control it remotely with my laptop's keyboard and mouse using Barrier, open multiple live feeds in picture-in-picture mode, play music in the background of whatever I'm watching, etc. Also, when I'm watching sports and they go to a side-by-side commercial break, I use the zoom accessibility feature to zoom in on the tiny live feed so I can watch that full screen without seeing any ads haha.
I'd be curious to know more about how you configured KDE. I run a pretty vanilla Pop OS setup right now, which is more usable than I expected with my USB remote, but I've been meaning to explore how to set up something more "smart TV"-like that's a bit easier to navigate. My initial thought was to write a browser extension or a custom app with an embedded browser, but that feels like a bit too much work for something that's supposed to be a leisure/entertainment setup.
Basically I removed all of the default panels and setup desktop widgets. The launcher widget is the most used. Within it I created custom launchers to open a web browser in full screen mode directed to a particular site like Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video etc. and downloaded icons for it. Other widgets I use is a task tray, weather widget, clock, external HD manager and power. I also found that I had to add the volume widget to get the volume controls on my USB remote to work for some reason.
I also configured font sizes, cursor size and mouse acceleration for usability. It works really well.
Yeah, I still have a streaming cable subscription but I pretty much only watch sports on it. If ESPN goes full streaming, that's probably where I'll end up. Between ESPN+ and AppleTV+ I'm most of the way there already.
Nah, time to move on to a single board computer running Kodi or Jellyfin, time to access YouTube only through a proxy like Invidious, time to become self-sufficient.
There really should be some mechanism to accidentally skip the contents between ads.
E.g., requiring to visit a link via QR tag using your phone for metrics verification (a "legitimate interest"!) in a timely manner, as soon as the QR tag shows up, otherwise, retry after the next 30 secs ad block… (Disclaimer: this comment demonstrates prior art to any similar patent applications.)
Rare I say this but I think broadly YouTube has a good offering even with 30second ad's. If you don't want ad's pay for premium I do and get more entertainment and education value than say Netflix and others. For instance in the UK there is a service called NowTV run by Sky, you pay ~£10 a month for entertainment package and more for sport and then still get ad's which for me makes it a no go.
I rarely watch any other streaming app! 95% to 98% of what I watch is YouTube. I've gotten so use to the short clips that I noticed I haven't had any interest in watching any Disney plus shows and I loved season one and two of The Mandalorian.
what is happening with me is I start to consume less and less content online. Many movies and series are crap and I don't like them. Video games the same. I'm not sure it is because I'm getting older and have the classic it used to better before syndrome. But what is happening and this is probably due to getting older I am more careful what I spend my time on. Consuming crap content or in a way it is a crappy experience... fuck that I will go outside and touch some gras.
Another phenomenon being the modern content tsunami. Just the new things coming out already overwhelm one's consumption capacity by several orders of magnitude, nevermind the older stuff that I haven't gotten to (includes SNES titles e.g.).
Makes me want to switch off entirely, or at least be hyperselective.
Given everything I've seen most is simply not worth it anyway, and at the rate new shit comes out we must long be looping already.
If you are averse to ad blockers getting your browser history, you can disable video auto play. For me it freezes the ads and brings to Skip Ad button.
Fine by me, and we should bring commercials back to regular tv too. I enjoyed the golden age of streaming as much as anyone else, but I always wondered how streamers were able to replace the huge sums of money from advertisements with just subscription money. Turns out they can't? We'll see, but I don't find advertisements to be as much of a plague as the rest of my generation.
I don't mind unskippable ads so much when I am watching a 10 minutes video. But a lot of information these days is mostly on youtube as opposed to text content. For example, how to change an obscure setting in windows or how to replace an alternator. But these videos also usually have a lot of background fluff. It's infuriating to skip back and forth to find the one relevant bit of info. If it takes 3 attempts to find the right timestamp, that's potentially up to 3 skippable ads and 3 unskippable ads before you get there.
Ironically videos with misinformation get demonetized and you can consume those much more conveniently.
Are YouTube unskippable ads reviewed for content, or is it a free-for-all system like the current ads? That's the problem I have as some of the current content is annoying, if not disgusting, the ad I saw that showed cartoon poop was awful.
This is user hostility on purpose- Google knows it's not what people want, but they need something to strong-arm them into picking up YT Premium. What better way than to provide a feature their advertiser want, and a way to push YT Premium?
If they ever lock down the ability to use your own machine with your own media through an HDMI port and ignore all the “smart” features I’m going to riot.
am i the only one worried that this will be one step closer for youtube to fight against yt-dlp and others, with a means to say it is circumnavigating more of their stuff?
I mean, just hook your TV up to a PC, even a raspberry pi can handle streaming video. Spares you the janky remote control navigation as well. Not sure why anyone even bothers with all the terrible smart TV apps.
Or I can pay YouTube for the premium tier without ads. I’m aware these things exist, but I’m also allergic to having to sysadmin things that I use to unwind after a day of sysadmining things.
I have discovered the ultimate secret to skipping YouTube ads! See what you've got to do is sign up for YouTube Premium and then the ads magically go away! Crazy, innit?
I don't understand why some people are SO OPPOSED to YouTube Premium.
Maybe it's that I watch a tooon of youtube, but it's the best subscription I have. Easily worth the cost IMO. Hell, don't get ads in my browser with yt regardless (ad blockers) but I pay for premium solely so that when I'm watching _youtube on someone elses TV_ I don't see ads.
IDK. I'm fine with them having to make money. And I'm fine just paying instead of having to sit through ads.
If you're not paying the company, you're the product. I'm happy that I can pay to not get ads.
I do the same with Twitch Turbo as well. It just... seems straightforward to me that this would be the preferred option for someone who can't sit through an ad.
I'm not hugely opposed to it, but my understanding is that whether or not I'm subscribe the videos will still be produced with clickbait titles, beg me to subscribe, include product placement, stretch everything out to try and keep me watching for as long as possible, over-promise and under-deliver, and so on. I'd pay to get rid of all of that nonsense. But just the ads? I have yet to be persuaded.
If it were as easy as merely dropping some coins/bills into the instrument case of a street performer is, I'd be perfectly willing to pay.
What I have absolutely no urge for are things like creating an account with Google (or any other service provider), having to give them a phone number and/or other information about myself in order to create that unwanted account, having to log in to it, having my activity tracked, having to get my credit card involved, not being certain that I'll get timely support if something goes wrong with all of that stuff, and so on.
> There’s a fuss because people want something for nothing. This is not at all surprising or interesting.
That's entirely your opinion, but I do agree it is neither surprising nor interesting. It's almost a trope at this point that a company providing something like this ends up milking the consumer to the point the consumer just stops caring.
I don't think there's a productive discussion to be had here. There are obviously two camps and neither are going to see eye to eye anytime soon. What will happen is YouTube will keep trying to milk their users for attention as much as possible (since more attention = more ad time). At some point in the future there will be a tipping point where people just lose interest. And when that happens people will again blame people "want[ing] something for nothing".
I’d honestly rather they make 4K60 a paid tier, and stick to a resolution they can afford to deliver at an appropriate data rate for non-paying viewers.
4K was tested as a premium feature recently but it was rolled back to being for everyone, not sure why. 4K YouTube TV is still an extra optional feature. No point here, just FYI in case you wanted to know.
I subscribe to Premium. It seems like a fair deal to me. My monthly payment is to Google in exchange for them delivering a service that I find valuable (the video storage and delivery mechanism). If I had to watch ads instead, I wouldn't use the service at all.
Creator ad reads, Patreon, merch, a portion of my Premium fee, etc., is to the creators in exchange for the work that they do that I find valuable.
It's a win all around as near as I can see.
That said, when a non-Googly service appears that can satisfy my video desires approximately as well, I'll bail on YouTube in a heartbeat and use the Premium money to pay for that.
Because you're the kind of customers Google wants. Not because you're paying for a service, but because you have shown that you want to pay for a service, which they can otherwise show for free with ads. You're the kind of customer advertisers want to see their ads blasted to. And trust me, while Google may not have ads for you now, it will happen eventually - and you won't see it coming. Heck, they might already be serving you to the advertisers in other ways.
I would love to get premium. But I can't. There is only a creditcard option and creditcards are not common in my country. So until youtube will implement a way for me to actually pay I will continue to ad block.
'The second big announcement are ads that appear "when people pause a video." What you’re watching will shrink and an advertisement will appear next to that window. In the example provided, we see an "Ad" that’s labeled with some text and a QR code. There’s a "Dismiss" button at the bottom to presumably return to the normal fullscreen pause screen, or you can just hit play again to resume.'
We are quickly approaching the "drink verification can"-level of ad injection and user hostility: https://i.redd.it/t9hsu8y6cts11.png
Sony wants users to play an "ad game": https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en
Google wants you to acknowledge an ad to unpause a video.