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The only thing is, once the streaming market has dominated, there is nothing stopping it to also turning into crap full of advertisements.

I remember when cable was cheap and as-free.

The transition looks good because it has too (to lure customers away from cable). My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.

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YouTube has definitely become more and more ad-ridden since its inceptions, and the ads are definitely personalized (though badly). There are now videos with multiple ad interruptions, a bit like ye olde TV. I do think one difference here is that on YouTube, if a video is full of ads, I won't keep watching long unless the content is solid and interesting. I, as a watcher, have a choice as to what I watch. Though of course, YouTube could fix that by imposing the same amount of ads on all videos.

Just today I swear I was served an ad that didn't have a yellow bar, so we can all look forward to that hell. At least cable is produced to have ad breaks that make sense, as opposed to cutting sentences in half.

What's the point of the yellow bars? I'm a little surprised they exist in the first place. What were they added in response to?

To let you skip the ad before it's over. You typically have to wait a few seconds but it's less than the full wait.

Adblockers (and youtube-dl and newpipe) still work on youtube, fortunately. It'll be a sad day when they ban those.

youtube-dl already violates the ToS, of pretty much any service it supports. But I doubt it'll ever make up a noticeable amount of traffic and it's certainly very useful, so my personal bet is tools like this will mostly continue to work unless they somehow become a threat to services in some way.

In the last two weeks youtube started having problems with uBlock. If it's on, youtube refuses to play videos that have ads on. At least for me. Maybe they are testing the ad-block-blockers, and I'm one of the subjects.

any videos in particular not having any issues myself

I use YouTube Red, no ads, ever. And you get access to the entire Google music library.

Can't beat it for $7.99/month.

I use uBlock Origin. No ads, ever. And you get access to all the music uploaded to YouTube.

$0.00/month

For many years I've used a few shell scripts to turn YouTube into a "radio" of sorts, basically going through search results for a specific term (usually a music genre) and playing each one. It works pretty well, and the only ad-like experience is when it decides to play something not-really-related-nor-actually-music that just showed up in the results, but IMHO the "what was that?" aspect is part of the fun.

I'm clearly not the only one who came up with such an idea:

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

It makes me sad your comment is being downvoted. If people aren't happy with ads, they aren't happy paying for anything, then what's the alternative? I don't see any. Those people need to get paid for their work somehow.

It's getting downvoted because paid options grow ads, like most cable channels did. (Not all of them. I think TCM is still ad-free.)

Plus, a comment sibling to this one said YouTube Red has ads, so there's that.

What does grow ads mean? FUD?

YouTube Premium is ad-free, it says so in their frontpage. Are you saying that's a blatant lie?

That doesn't address my point that content producers should get paid.

From YouTube Premium ad: "Ad-free YouTube, and our new music streaming service, YouTube Music. Services: No ads, Downloads, Background play."

...or he got downvoted because it’s a solution that doesn’t work for all (I haven’t downvoted). I tried to subscribe to premium, but there’s no such option for me. It’s not available in my country.

I have red, still plenty of ads.

What? I’ve had YouTube premium for well over a year and literally never seen an ad that wasn’t part of the actual video I was watching, added by the creator.

Ad thats part of the actual video is an ad too.

That obviously doesn’t count, as there really isn’t anything YouTube can do about that.

Google could respond by forcing them into an AdWords-like program and making embedded ads unskippable.

That absolutely count. Youtube can ban this kind of video.

... which you can pretty easily fast forward through.

It's YouTube Premium now, and it's $11.99/month. Also, without resorting to APK hacks I don't think it's possible to use on my Amazon Fire Stick. Otherwise I'd love to pay for YouTube to watch YouTube without advertisements.

On Fire TV you can use the web version of Youtube in the browser (Silk or Firefox) and it works pretty well as it's formatted for the larger screen. I'm not sure if this doesn't apply to Fire Stick.

Ah, for some reason I just assumed that YouTube Premium didn't work with Firefox, which is what I use now, and you had to have the native Android App. I think the problem I had the last time I tried this had to do with the fact that I had a YouTube creator account, and Red wouldn't work with it.

Anyway, now I'm putting my money where my mouth is and am happily watching ad free YouTube content (which I love dearly) on my TV. Totally worth it.

Don't forget about Google Music as well. Overall a pretty solid subscription package.

I pay for Premium because I have zero tolerance for ads. I think PBS Eons, Kurgesacht, Rogan podcasts and random searches for stand-up are worth their weight in gold. I'll pass on insurance and web design ads, thanks.

Of course, Youtube is free, unless you have a Youtube Red subscription, in which case you don't see ads.

And the fact of the matter is, the ads they do have don't produce enough revenue to support most creators.

I suppose you could argue that's because Google's cut is too high, but in Youtube's case (as opposed to, say, Apple's App Store), I feel Google is providing a substantial service—hosting, encoding, and distributing a huge amount of data.

I have a Play Music subscription which includes YouTube Red. I haven't seen an ad in years.

>> My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.

Unlike cable TV in the US currently, which is either a monopoly or duopoly, there is a decent bit of competition on streaming. Currently, there is Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, among others. Yes, the content is often only partially overlapping, but the point is -- there is competition. This is much more promising for customers than the current situation -- where you often have one and only once choice and they can do whatever they want.

Overall, I'd say advertisements are the least of worries for me. The greater worry is you sign up for a $90/mo plan and the bill magically becomes $120/mo. You are forced to watch TV on their schedule. You sign up for a 12 or 24mo plan which you cannot cancel, even if you lose crucial channels (e.g., Disney) And the thing is near-impossible to cancel without spending hours in call-wait hell.

It will only take one company to jump the gun, introduce advertising and the rest will follow after a huge increase in revenue. People won’t just leave automatically, especially if their locked to service specific content.

I actually miss the good old days of cable with few ads. Turn the TV on, view your favorite channels, and you know the shows are going to be good, especially during prime time.

Easy fix if ads do come along: cancel your subscription.

I pay to watch what I want, not what other people would like me to see. If I’m paying to see what people would like me to see, then I will stop paying. It really is that simple.

Won't matter, a much larger percent of the frogs won't leap out of the pot. Then it becomes "normal" to charge and have ads and no "rationally behaved" corporation will do anything less.

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