YouTube on TVs getting unskippable 30-second and pause screen ads
9to5google.com
9to5google.com
'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.
There is no problem adtech creates, that cannot be solved by more invasive telemetry.
Well, except for the "invasive telemetry", of course.
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.
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.
This reminds me ...
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.
Anyone here remembers?
Curious to know what they ridiculed as the absurd future -- and how far/close actual biometric security has come in these two decades since.
Sorry it is off-topic, just my curiosity.
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.
I seem to remember that a colleague shows up briefly, also bald. But search engines have been aggressively unhelpful.
Edit: your comment is now the Google top result for searches on this ad. Congratulations?
The world is really turning into an episode of Black Mirror.
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.
That was one of the big selling points of cable TV when it started: because you were paying for the service, there was no need for commercials.
I remember when cable started adding channels with commercials. "Who's going to pay to watch that?" smarty pants people said.
Yet, here we are.
Just wait until ads start popping up on the paid YouTube service. The greed is just too strong.
You can just press play as normal
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.
Take the power back!
In any case according to the instructions on the tin it should work.
Twitter was on fire about it, so I don’t think it was just me.
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.
2. Destroy competitors
3. Degrade service in pursuit of maximum profit
Is anyone else starting to feel cynical? I feel like anything good today is just portending a tomorrow even worse than yesterday.
Everything has a lifespan, without exception. The only variable is how long that lifespan is. That's just how things work.
Been here for a long while. Welcome, friend!
Most people won't bother getting up for the shorter adverts - so whilst on mute - the advert will get your attention visually.
Win-win in the eyes of the advertiser.
Those commercials are why I stopped watching cable, and why I stopped watching broadcast TV, in the first place.
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?
Much like search before it, they've saturated the market, and so instead of growing by adding eyeballs, they now need more revenue per eyeball.
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.
My family just ditched YT premium because they upped the price to $22.99/month. Or Netflix subscription is $9.99.
That said, as of this writing Netflix’s premium plan is $19.99/m. YouTube’s is $22.99. While they are comparable, they are not equivalent.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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'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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Once advertising is on the table, there is no stopping.
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.
Us non-Premium users? Probably unskippable 5m before, during, and after.
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.
Well, I don't see you signal boosting any of the less annoying ads here...
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.
I've been using it on my nVidia Shield for a while now. No ads, a lot of UI customisation, and Sponsorblock is integrated as well.
Would you share the details of the hardware setup (MiniPC, USB remote control) and screenshots of your configured KDE/Plasma desktop?
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.
I also configured font sizes, cursor size and mouse acceleration for usability. It works really well.
I did that for a few years until I realized I wasn't really watching TV.
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.)
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.
Ironically videos with misinformation get demonetized and you can consume those much more conveniently.
It can skip ads and/or sponsor segments, intro, outro etc.
You will have to buy the Raspberry Pi from 3 children in a trenchcoat in the subterranean parking of the abandoned mall, but it should work.
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.
Making something worse then let people paying for to make it better is not a deal at all.
Video is expensive to serve. There’s no way around it.
If it were so palatable I don't think there'd be such a fuss about it (which there clearly is). Most people don't like ads at all.[1]
1. https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-repor...
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".
Whatever Youtube is commonly serving me doesn’t exactly look like premium bitrates, to be honest.
I recently uploaded a pan/landscape shot and was shocked by how blocky the result looks like – even (or especially) in "4K60 HDR".
Besides, YouTube Premium doesn't get rid of creator sponsorships.
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.
That's fine. It's good for now. If Google starts showing me ads anyway, then I'll cancel my subscription and stop using YouTube.
Paying for two music subscriptions at once just seems silly.
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.
Entitlement.