Oof I think this service is only worth it if you have a family plan and everyone helping. That is how I personally make it reasonable in terms of pricing.
“YouTube Vanced” on my phone (Pixel 7 Pro) and then use “Smart Tube Next” on my Sony Bravia Android TV, I’d happily pay for just Ad-free YouTube but I refuse to pay for YouTube music bundled into it.
I use it too rarely to justify paying monthly. Now I thought about it, if it were only like 4,99. That’s still 60 bucks a year, which is a lot for all the in-video ads you see anyways. But triple that, hell nah.
I used to have this bundled with Youtube Music. The Youtube Music app was possibly the worst Android app I have ever used, slow, unstable, buggy and flaky as all hell. Ditched it for Deezer which has a terrific if slightly disorganised catalogue and a far better app
Ah, we have Waterworld. In HD. Ya... there is an island still, we call it Spotify on our boat. We couldn't do without our shanties... But we do have a sea cave ready tho, when those Privateers become greedy.
How? I had the same plan and got an email saying they wouldn’t honor the grandfathered plan and I was still being upped. I think they gave me an extra month or two at the lower rate and that was it.
I have the $10 price from Google Play Music and just got an email saying they were jacking my price to $14, but because I’ve been such a long-time user they’re giving me until December.
I wish I didn’t have to pay for premium, but we’re all iOS users and we use Smart TVs and Chromcasts to cast and I’m not sure how to block ads on those (not Android TV, Samsung TVs).
If there’s a way to block ads there I’d love to know. I can’t really use AltStore either, I’ve tied it in the past and I don’t always have the means to refresh every 7 days.
But I think they will cut access without ads soon enough, and I do agree someone needs to pay for the service.
My problem is quality of the platform went down with higer quality of production. Those with better production are doing better than those with quality content. Additionally it started looking like TV network with dozen big shows, and not enough random content. Ex. they always recommend me videos with 1M+ views, even thou a I want only ones with less than 100k.
I have been dusting of my podcast players for some time. I like to have a video, but looks like price is too high for me. Audio will be good.
Pi hole does not work for YouTube (or Twitch or many others). It doesn’t work for services who distribute ads from their own servers.
If you had Android instead of iOS you may have been able to use an ad-free youtube client and cast to TV, but if you’re streaming on the TV, or from iOS, I don’t know how you’d go about blocking ads.
Right. I’ve done my research before and I do have a Pi hole setup on my Linux server. I used Vanced back when I was on Android but I had to switch to iOS for work and stayed on it since.
It sucks because I’d much rather not pay for YouTube at all, but we share the family plan since we’re all on iOS…
I think the best solution right now for older Chromecast (ones without a dedicated remote) is running castblock on a raspberry pi or something else attached to your network. It doesn't block ads but it can automatically mute the chromecast volume when ads are playing, as well as automatically hit the skip button when it shows up (maybe like 5% of the time it misses both but still better than nothing). It also looks up sponsor segments from sponsorblock and detects when a sponsor is about to play and can skip those too. It auto detects all Chromecast on the network so all you have to do is run the program with the flags for what features you want enabled / what sponsorblock segments it should skip.
If you have a Chromecast with Google TV (with like a remote control and apps) I've heard smarttube-next is a good alternative app with ad blocking.
I'm not sure what works with TVs that have Chromecast built in, might also be smarttube-next. I only have the Chromecast ultra and the older standard Chromecast and castblock works great running on my pihole box
Yeah… not much you can do beyond DNS-based blocking for most dumb SmartTV OSes and obviously sideloading iOS apps sucks if you’re not jailbroken. Cases like these are really where they get you!
Regarding Chromecasts, just in case anyone’s interested: they’re still Android under the hood, so you can simply send the Revanced Manager APK via Send files to TV and proceed as usual. FYI: you need to enable developer mode (see step 3, specfically) to install custom APKs – this won’t impact your warranty.
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