YouTube on TVs is cramming ads down your throat even when pausing videos
YouTube on TVs is cramming ads down your throat even when pausing videos
YouTube has been testing a Pause ads format for over a year now, and it's starting to show up for some users.
Android: revanced manager
Pc: firefox+ublock+dearrow+sponsorblock
AndroidTv: smartTubeNext
I haven't seen an ad in years
I wouldn't call them 'better' alternatives. They're easier to install for sure. Personally, I've used revanced, newpipe, and libretube and love them all. I stuck with newpipe, since that's what my family uses now, and it's easier to troubleshoot when I have it too. And revanced takes some steps, more than just "install this package, done".
Obligatory post mentioning that Freetube exists on Android as well. With Syncthing, I sync history, playlists and subscriptions. It's brilliant.
Now do Android TV! All I want is to be able to allowlist channels for my kids but block everything else. I know an htpc is a better option but I'm lazy.
Pipepipe, its like Tubular but more reliable ime
What's the difference between smart tube and smatttubenext?
it's the one after
Smarttube next is the bleeding edge beta version, it gets fixed much faster and supposedly has more bugs though I've never ran into one
SmartTube is so good. You get it for no ads; you keep it for all the dope features. It's like YT way back in the day with more advanced shit for anyone that loves tinkering with all the fiddly bits.
This is my exact setup and couldn't be happier with it.
iOS DID have Yattee, but it's basically unusable at this point unless I'm doing something terribly wrong on my end. Every time I try to use it, even when signed in, I get errors no matter which back end I use.
what's the best way to get smartubenext/apks onto google tv with chromecast these days?
I run:
Android: LibreTube
PC: Freetube (w/ Firefox redirect plugin)
AndroidTV: SmartTubeNext
This is literally the only way I will view content on YouTube.
Firestick: https://www.firesticktricks.com/
They have actually started serving ads with a skip button... That only skips to the next ad.
That's been a thing for years now like back before I got premium which was at least 4 years ago the skip button would skip the first ad and then bring you into a timed ad afterward that you couldn't skip, was obnoxious as hell
This presents a good demonstration of what we can expect Alphabet / Google / Youtube to do if ever it should win its war on adblockers, or convince people to watch YouTube without vetting. Any time it promises to compromise and make a tolerable user experience, it will ratchet up advertisement plugs until it becomes intolerable.
This is why we can't relent, ever.
This is why we can’t relent
What are "we" doing? Not uninstalling our ad blockers? Its not as though people are boycotting the site. Just use Piped, ffs. No ads whatsoever. It's a late-00s YouTube experience.
We the public have to keep making better ad blockers that better detect ads and prevent them from being displayed (or in some cases, activating their malware payload).
YouTube is trying to either detect ad blockers and deny service, or change the insertion paradigm so that ads cannot be blocked. We cannot let them succeed doing either.
I would have omitted the last panel.
Thats why i have a dumb tv with a little linux pc attached to it, so i can open piped and jellyfin in my librewolf browser.
Tell me more, pretend I am in idiot...how do I do this?
Are you me? Except I use FreeTube instead of Piped. I am so happy with this solution. Years of discontent of watching services going through the enshittification cycle... everything just becoming so underwhelming. This has given me back freedom over my own media consumption. No ads. No endless scrolling through bullshit content. Just a nicely personally curated selection of movies and TV shows (on Jellyfin) and an ad-free YouTube-experience with sponsorblock and dearrow enabled, and blocking of live chats and shorts.
what model? im looking into getting a dumb tv myself but havent found anything good
Well its just old sony tv and i am looking for a replacement with better quality and it is pretty hard to find anything. I will probably just go with a smart tv and never connect it to the internet. You can hack samsung TVs to jump straight into a hdmi input so i will probably do that even tho i am not happy with it.
Not only is this true and annoying, but other things about the ads are getting worse, too.
I recently had to factory reset my TV and, after the first time I opened the YouTube app, immediately had to find the "don't play video preview" option. It worked, except for the huge banner ad at the top of the list of videos, which still saw fit to play with deafening sound when I didn't immediately change the video selection. I can't find a setting to disable this.
Also, I've noticed the "fewer ads for this long video" message popping up during videos longer than thirty minutes (and now it seems like longer than twenty minutes). Not only is that message condescending like they're doing me a favor, but I'm pretty sure it's not true, at least not by much; and the ads are definitely longer and mostly unskippable.
Like someone else says in this thread, it feels like extortion.
Try this, if your TV can run it: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ No ads, and there is even sponsor block included, so you don’t have to hear the annoying „segue to our sponsor“ and „please like and subscribe“ nonsense.
It wouldn't be so bad if they actually had ad breaks instead of stopping my video mid sente....... SHAVE YOUR BALLS WITH MANSCAPE...... nce
It's funny because I only hear about ads now from you guys. I never see them myself.
Using freetube on a Linux media player connected to my TV and Newpipe on the phone.
How did you get newpipe to work? It's been broken for me for like the past 3 weeks.
Latest NewPipe 0.27.2 installed from F-Droid is able to play videos for me. But you might also try PipePipe or Tubular, which I mostly use these days.
It was broken for a day but there was an update on f Droid. Just installed that and it's been fine.
I like to open multiple tabs on what I'm going to watch next, and Freetube is a bit clunky with the window management (I wish they had tabs!). So far uBlock has been doing an impeccable job...but these days I can see it struggling a bit more. I can see youtube REALLY tries to give me an ad first, sometimes when you open the video, you can see the first frame of an ad instead of the thumbnail while it starts buffering, then it skips to the video. The ad is not shown, but the first frame of an ad sometimes escapes into the video while it buffers at the beginning, for a second.
Yeah, it’s bad….. I didn’t feel like login into my premium account the other day and it was kinda much…….
I am hoping we get a Democrat to in office this year. With the balls(Well she technically does not have balls; but you get my drift) to break some FUCKING monopolies up. We need to break up Ma Bell again
Harris is married to the brother of an Uber executive. If you were hoping for a trust-buster, you picked the wrong candidate. Those $500k/plate fundraising dinners she hosts are coming entirely out of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaire bracket.
Black mirror is getting closer everyday
Speaking of which, anyone notice the hellishly annoying full-screen shitty mobile games Netflix keeps front-paging?
Seriously considering just giving up on the service and going entirely to piracy.
I experienced this crazy onslaught of advertising to the point of reducing how much I watched YouTube. I was pretty upset and not at all inclined to pay, especially since YouTube was even putting ads on my own videos without me seeing a single cent, because my channel is too small.
Then my partner bought me a few months of a Premium Subscription as a Christmas gift.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Combined with background music on mobile, it's changed my life.
I'm still unimpressed with the business model, but the alternative is so far worse.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn't require self hosting and I'll happily move my content there.
To me this is way too much like extortion. The more they do this the less I want to give them money.
Also I need to be logged on everywhere, which I don't want to (have to), mostly for privacy and data harvesting reasons.
It also does not help that when I want to see something and jump around in a video, I get the same ad 30 times. No exaggeration.
It absolutely is.
It's possibly also how they'll get broken up by the DoJ.
The thing is... All the premium features USED TO BE FREE AND AVAILABLE UNTIL THEY LOCKED THEM BEHIND A PAY WALL.
I used to be able to have YouTube playing in the background, reduced ads, etc. All of the features.
Now, I still do because I use Firefox + ublock on mobile. Yeah, I can play this shit with my screen off (Firefox + unlock + desktop mode + turn screen off).
Fuck 'em.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.
My problem is that I don't really want Google -- a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining -- logging and data-mining everything I watch.
YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it's not buying any kind of no-log service -- in fact, it's just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That's not the service that I want to buy from Google.
What I'd be willing to get from Google is a "no log" service.
I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I'm fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data...but I want part of that service to be that they aren't logging what I do and data-mining my data.
I don't like the model of "we don't charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can". I'm fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn't what I want for myself.
I think that every single provider tracks your activity and the vast majority of them use it to optimise their service income from you, either by giving you better engagement, ie. making you use the service more - endless searching for content for example, or by selling the captured tracking data to the highest bidder.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn't require self hosting and I'll happily move my content there.
Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it's easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don't need to dance around the censors on Nebula.
Nebula is subscription-based, so they don't show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don't want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It's $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I've had an account for over 3 years now, it's almost paid for itself.
Don't forget the benefit of being able to spite Google!
The lifetime access option shouldn't exist for an app like that, not unless they have another primary form of income (usually ads). That type of service costs a lot of money to host and if you have a user base that does a one off purchase you stop having a good chunk of that income relatively fast
That's just the main red flag I see from that, I would be super hesient starting on a platform that isn't self sustaining and doesn't have a parent company willing to chuck money at it "till it works" like Google did
They've even started having "next" instead of "skip" so it just goes to another ad. But the worst is when it gives you an unstoppable 90 second ad roll, comes back to the video for all of 2 seconds and starts yet another 90 second ad roll.
If I want to watch YouTube on the bigger screen now, I just open it in Firefox on my VR headset.
I've had it return from ads, make the video playback stutter. I refresh/reload or whatever, jump back in, get more ads, video playback stutter. It's annoying as fuck
i used to do this trick to skip ads on the tv app, where i'd go to the report section and click 'return to video' but i abused it too much so they took away the report button entirely for me :[
Didnt noticed it with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)
This is the way
I’m going to show this real quick and then we’re going to move on, so pause the video if you want to take a closer look…
Phone: rings
Me: "better pause Youtube so that I can answer without noise in the background"
Youtube: plays ad with even louder audio
Me:
Better switch to some horror film murder compilation video before answering the phone. At least I know it’s going to be all screams and blood splattering on the walls while I’m talking on the phone.
A bit of a PSA for LG owners running webOS:
I rooted my tv and now have adless youtube, but apparently root is not a prerequisite - there also installation using dev mode. Admitedly, haven't tried it and it's probably less convenient to get it set up, but then it should be a one time thing.
I've got an LG C1 and have been using homebrew with Dev mode for a while now.
Can confirm it is very easy to do if you have a basic tech knowledge base.
The only inconvenience is sometimes after updates it will delete the homebrew apps but its a 5 minute job to get them back and ive only had it happen probably 3 times over a year.
"Youtube no ads" - the homebrew app, works flawlessly as if it were the original app with all of your subs etc but every now and then a tiny banner comes up begging me to subscribe to premium which I actually love because I can keep telling them to fuck off. The frequency of the little banner is probably once every few times you open the app and its non-intrusive.
Overall the LG dev mode trick with the Youtube No Ads app has been the cleanest and most enjoyable out of the box experience compared to alternative frontends etc.
I have an LG with WebOS and have youtube premium and haven't seen any ads so far (though it may be regional). Cheers for the link, tough. I wonder if it works on Japanese versions
I also noticed that they started showing ads upon opening YouTube on Android TV.
Google sucks so bad.
Honestly looking at the article this seems way less intrusive than pre-roll and mid-roll video ads. If this was to replace them I’d be ok with that. But this is Google so of course it’s just going to be as well as, so my adblocker is staying on for as long as it works
I'm just tired of my electronics doing "extra". I want to pause the video/player, I don't want that to activate other activities for my device to perform...I just want to pause the fucking video. They're all guilty of this though, either they show ads or screenshots of what they want you to watch next. I can't even pause a video anymore to look at something or show something. The amount of times I've paused to have a discussion and the distracting shit plays in the background annoyed me to the point I no longer use the "smart tv" to watch anything and only use the tv hooked up to the comp so I can actually control and have a pleasant viewing experience.
I used to watch on ps4, but couldn't stand the ads anymore so I bought a new PC and repurposed my old PC into a Linux TV box. Now I watch freetube on my TV with no ads and no tracking.
How do you control it? Any fancy integration or just good old mouse?
At first I connected the PS4 dualshock controller to the PC via bluetooth and configured it to move the cursor similarly to how the ps4 works, but the virtual keyboard on Linux Mint kept popping up and going away randomly so I bought a mini Bluetooth keyboard with a small touch pad instead.
I did also try voice commands and it worked great, but I didn't want to carry a mic around so I never really used it.
I wouldn't mind them if they didn't BREAK MY REMOTE'S PLAY BUTTON.
I was casting a video to my shield from my phone and ended up needing to pause for a phone call during an ad roll. Pausing worked fine but the play button on my phone was completely unresponsive after. Thankfully the shield remote still worked, but clearly play/pause during ads is handled differently than during normal videos and something is broken.
Imagine watching YouTube. Your kid, spouse, grandparent, whatever falls and gets badly hurt. You pause the video (out of habit, instead of shutting off the TV) to tend to them. You toss the remote as you rush off the couch, the remote is lost. Instead of silence so you can hear whether they're breathing and be able to hear and talk to the emergency services dispatcher, you hear an unskippable ad. They perish, because the dispatcher couldn't hear you and get the ambulance truck to your door in time.
Imagine watching YouTube. You're alone in your house. You hear something at the window behind you. You pause the video, since it's probably nothing, to listen more intently. Instead of silence to allow you hear the burglar, you hear an ad for something you would never buy, as the burglar breaks into your house and attacks you for that sweet, sweet PS5. You perish, because you couldn't react in time.
Edge cases? Maybe. Possible? Yes. Will YouTube/google be charged with accessory to murder? I highly doubt that.
Pause ads are a very bad, and very dangerous, idea.
Agreed, but the word you want is perish, as parish relates to a land/area.
Hahahahaha!! Good catch! Fixing now
When I see you perish all I can think of is:
You are watching TV and hear a noise in a nearby room
PAUSE TV_
you pause the TV but to your dismay the TV plays an ad by a political candidate!! The sounds of the shadowy figure are drowned out
SHUT TV OFF_
whoops! Unfortunately for you this is a smart TV! And you need your phone to shut it off, it's in the same room that the noise is coming from
RUN AWAY
You hear glass break.
...
Unable to pinpoint the location of your adversary, you are caught by surprise and bludgeoned by a steel bar and lay in a pool of your own blood. As your vitality seeps away through the hole in your fractured skull, you wonder the many outcomes that will never come to pass had you had YouTube Premium
You perish
START OVER? Y/N
I’ve been a subscriber for years. Even though it’s expensive there’s no question that my high level of usage justifies it. I get more per dollar than from Prime Video or Netflix, and that’s for sure.
I’m glad YT still has a zero ad tier. Prime now shoves ads inline during shows even though I’m a paying subscriber. Hulu always has. Netflix will at some point.
Paying to have your data stolen and sold sounds like a shit deal. Just use one of the many 3rd party apps for YouTube and Stremio for streaming. Fuck all those greedy shits. I support a select few content creators either via Patreon or their own website (Viva+), the rest can go fuck off. The internet was better when people made videos for shits and giggles. The best memes came from that era.
🤷♂️I was here for that too and it was wonderful - I still have a folder packed with wonderful things from that era. But I see that as a totally different thing. I know YT has a ton of trash on like Mr Beast etc. But it also has Veritassium! I use YT to learn so many practical things. I’ve learned gardening, woodworking, plumbing, all kinds of repair and on and on from YT. I also support some creators directly when I feel the urge. And I subscribe to Nebula. I have a full Plex and *arr setup with a massive library collected over years. I still use the shit out of YT! 🤷♂️ And I’m on my phone almost all the time so whatever desktop computer programs people run in Docker containers or browser extension spaghetti setups they have to get around this or that… that’s great for them. I’d rather pay $12 than fuck with all that and be tied to my gaming tower. 🤷♂️ I don’t consider it having my data stolen if a provider takes notes about how I use their product 🤷♂️
does anyone here use librewolf? for the past month or so YouTube has been completely fucked there. constantly freezing, sometimes pic only, sometimes fully as if my internet is slow, which it isn't.
I'm suspecting they're purposely fucking it for non chromium browsers but haven't seen much complaining about it. i go back to Vivaldi for YouTube for now which works perfectly but soon enough the ublock will stop working.
does it happen to anyone? is it non chromiums? is it librewolf? is it just mine?
Firefox working fine for me
Oh, it's sleep(5) all over again.
Yep, when ive resorted to yt directly on librewolf it usually freezes/buffers and tab needs refreshing every 5-10mins or so of vid. Sometimes it’s ok. Pretty inconsistent. I use ublock and sponsor block with librewolf . Usually i use invidious or yattee, Which have their own issues also playing whackamole with the giant
based on another comment I'll check out privacy badger and noscript; see if that helps
Yes. Noticed yesterday. I was even logged in to a friend's YouTube Premium account. Loaded like I have slow internet.
yeah its time for people to leave yt
With my Argentine premium account I don't see any ads...
Warum benutzen Sie ein argentinisches Konto?
... Interesting.
I am not a content creator and do not upload anything. My use would just be as a consumer.
As a consumer, I will not use YT simply because of ads and the way they have made removing ads without a premium subscription so ridiculously difficult and time consuming.
Imo, having ads thrown in your face when you pause it, is reason enough not to use again.
good thing I use redacted in Firefox and apps that are cracked like redacted
This is specifically about TV apps.
Any investors question would be, why did this take Google Youtube so long to implement such a feature, of course this is why the ads are being crammed like this on Smart TVs.
My SO wants to upgrade our TV, so when we go to the store, they see big, beautiful displays, and I just see ads.
same with amazon. its the latest newness. I really miss rabbit ears.
I have rabbit ears hooked into my Plex server so I can record the few shows left on linear broadcast tv
im complaining a bit about the switch to digital to.
We are going back to the days of TV where half the time was spent watching ads!
if you have an apple tv and an iphone, use youtube in the browser with adguard and airplay. No ads, no bs
you could also try this for iPhone: https://github.com/arichornloverALT/uYouEnhanced it has sponsorblock included too
Or get a Chromecast and smarttube...
Tubular fork of newpipe works on AndroidTV, don't know if newpipe itself does but last time I checked it didn't. So I use it on both tv and phone.
Is its UI adapted to Android TV? Or does it look like on mobile?
Sadly it's not, and navigating around it takes a little bit of getting used to (trying to close a video for example is a somewhat counter intuitive). But I'll take it over adds in youtube. That being said, I used it sparsely, as I don't have much I want to watch there except play the odd song or maybe one or two other videos a week.
smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ for tv
Warum nicht?
People allow their TV to connect to the interpipes? Tut tut, I thought y'all were better than that!
I just pay for YouTube premium family. We all get add free YouTube. Plus music which we all use. It's a great value and no hastle. More money goes to creators this way as well.
Sadly, YouTube TV doesn't include YT Premium.
Which is the weirdest shit imaginable to me.
In any case, adverts on the pause screen should be banned.
The entire advertising industry is long overdue for a massive clapback and course correction, because it has infested every inch of waking life.
Thank god then I can pay individual creators, too, while I pay for premium.
Everyone is a netflix now.
This is the right answer. If more people subscribed... Well, it wouldn't have to be this way.
I don't get ads. I pay 🤷♂️.
Yeah, apparently paying for a service you use and enjoy is stupid or something. 🤷♂️