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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

SmartTube on Android TV. Brilliant, makes YouTube usable, Sponsorblock baked in.

Sponsor block is much less useful now Premium subscriptions have the "skip commonly skipped section" feature, which is always the sponsored content. With the addition of this, you can avoid ads and sponsors well enough now on Premium for me.

I was pleasantly surprised YouTube came out with a first party tool to skip sponcon.

> https://dataconomy.com/2025/07/30/youtubes-ai-powered-jump-a...

I can imagine creators aren't going to be happy about that. Can't see it lasting long.

Perhaps, but its been a while now and AFAIK has been rolled out to all of YouTube's apps, even the integrated TV ones.

It only shows up for YouTube premium users, and premium user views pay more than ad supported views.

I’m sure they would much rather a premium user watches and skips the sponsor section than the usual HN viewer who has ads and sponsor sections blocked.

Sponsorblock is only one small part of the great features of Smarttube. Completely removing all "shorts" is the reason I switched to it. And the UI is very customizable, where the Youtube app is not customizable at all. Smarttube has unlocked so much potential that the Youtube app just doesn;t offer.

I don't understand why you wouldn't just get yt premium. You get the same features and it pays out well. YouTube premium views are like gold nuggets for creators.

No Sponsorblock (so doesn't block ads by creators themselves, the cliches like NordVPN/SquareSpace etc. you have to manually skip)

They also keep upping the price every so often. SmartTube is free.

I had YouTube Premium via a VPN subscription then they cracked down on it, sod em! Why do I have to pay more because I'm a Brit than if I were an Indian? Don't bull me on "because I live in a Western country I've got a better salary etc.". If they can afford to provide it to Indians for a lower price then why would it cost them more to provide it to me? Same bandwidth costs. Greed.

Does YT Premium have something Luke SponsorBlock? Can I press a button to remove Shorts from search results? Can I reenable seeing dislikes under videos to know which ones are not worth watching?

If not, then I still need to have a custom app/browser extension... at which point why would I pay for subscription anyway?

I use Smarttube and I pay for Youtube premium, I guess I am an edge case. The Youtube app has nowhere near the customizable features Smarttube has. And I can completely block all "shorts" using Smarttube. I pay for Youtube premium because I also often use Youtube in a web browser, so no ads there is still helpful.

"I don't understand why you wouldn't just give the platform that continually gets worse your money for a slightly less worse experience"

I can't believe anybody who did not start using youtube yesterday would ever consider rewarding them. The sheer amount of overwhelmingly negative and widely disliked shit they do every single year for the last decade is staggering.

So I'm watching a thing on youtube. 5 minutes in I get a commercial.

SmartTube can seamlessly delete that commercial?

Yes, no ads from Google's side and ads by creators themselves (e.g. Raid Shadow Legends, SquareSpace, Manscaped, NordVPN etc. etc.) get skipped via a community-sourced database called Sponsorblock.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

(Sponsorblock is also available as a browser extension for most browsers but has an open API for other developers to use)

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