YouTube to start blocking third-party apps that don't show ads | Hacker News Reader

YouTube to start blocking third-party apps that don't show ads

arstechnica.com

38 pointsNobleExpress21 comments

What frustrates me is that the user experience with YouTube premium is still worse than with NewPipe.

I have YouTube Premium and I still have NewPipe installed because I don't always want the one-off videos I watch to affect my suggestions.

Also NewPipe has the ability to group the channels I watch.

The YouTube app defaults to auto-play on, and even after turning it off, sometimes it'll turn back on.

I just delete things from watch history if I don't want it recommended. I haven't had auto play turned on for a very long time.

I wish you could turn off auto-play when watching a video from a playlist. The general auto-play option doesn't have any impact on playlists.

I know I can do that, but I'd rather not have to bother. It's actually easier to open a video in a separate app. In the YouTube app on my phone I can tap the Share button and then send it to the NewPipe app. Easy-peasy.

To delete things from my watch history requires me to remember to remove it. If I forget then I have to scroll through my history to find it. Not ideal.

The YouTube app now has incognito mode, which shouldn’t affect your recommendations.

It does, but at least on iOS, turning on incognito mode also turns off the YT premium features that you're paying for.

Same on Android. I was so disappointed when I saw that.

This is all very fixable for Google: stop streaming video for free to clients that don’t have subscriptions.

Otherwise, if you send the content to my device for free, it is my right decide which parts to watch and which parts to skip.

It is your right and I think courts in most countries agree.

The legality of publishing (and profiting from) ad-blocking software and what companies are allowed to do in order to interfere with ad-blocking is less clear.

But one thing for sure, while ad-blocking is your right, companies certainly don't have to make it easy.

Once again, per Jamie Kellner, your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots, otherwise you're stealing programming.

I wonder how many people would have accepted the industry making it impossible to change channels during "spots" while watching TV a few decades ago

Because people never ever in history got up to do other stuff when commercials came on. Everyone has been "stealing programming" forever.

Ads are a gamble, you bet your money that showing me a dumb clip will make me want your product. Guess what, you lost.

How do they plan on doing this exactly? NewPipe only parses the website and yt-dlp pretends to be Android/iOS. They can't break these in a way that wouldn't be fixable. yt-dlp already ignores the "not available on this app" video ID bait-and-switch trick.

They aren't going after the app but the user: "rather than going after the projects, Google says it's going to start disrupting users who are using these apps. The post writes, "Viewers who are using these third-party apps may experience buffering issues or see the error 'The following content is not available on this app' when trying to watch a video." "

They can detect whatever spoofing these apps use and fuck with you if they do detect it.

Pretty easy actually.

All video is streamed in blocks currently (HLS streaming mostly). So if they really want they would inject adds inside those blocks and the player won't be able to distinguish between ads blocks and video blocks. They can stop sending you blocks if you didn't get all the "ad blocks" beforehand for the duration of the ad. Even if your player "knows" because of a "Sponsor Block" database the interval it needs to skip, by not giving you the blocks beforehand you'd need to wait.

They can also give the stream only to DRM compliant players.

We may end up with some shadow YT libraries with ripped videos. Some distributed crypto hosting platform where the more you seed/rip, the more tokens you get for watching or something like that.

"The only free cheese you'll find is in the mousetrap". Free hosting and streaming is not guaranteed, when the big company pays for the hosting.

Can't recommend SmartTube enough: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

Includes crowdsourced sponsor block as well. The day YouTube goes the Twitch route and starts embedding ads is the day I stop using it. Literally unwatchable at this point without adblocking.

I use SmartTube with my YT Premium subscriptions as its feature set is just way better than the official app.

I have a Youtube ad-skip browser extension that fast forwards through ads. It is really good at this but the creator has recently started trying to inject extra functionality into the extension (some random AI stuff) that is turning me off. I would love to know if anyone has experience with a well-behaved extension for Youtube ad skipping.

I wonder if the big shots at YouTube watched Tom & Jerry growing up.

The mouse usually wins.

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