I’m always surprised when I watch a video that is 9 minutes old and the sponsors segments get skipped automatically. That extension must be getting quite popular.
I pay for YouTube Premium to block YouTube's "native" ads on Apple TV, but yeah, the sponsorship crap is getting out of hand. I need to look into getting the Apple TV sponsorblock thing set up.
This is a side complaint on YT but I have purchased so many UHD movies and they only stream in 480P. I think you have to have some kind of YouTube certified device to play it in UHD but annoying.
Pro tip: If you still have a local record store with a used section, you can probably buy blurays and dvds super cheap. They’re typically 25-50% the price of renting on Amazon/Apple, or buying used media on Amazon.
Also, it’s actually easier to bypass the DRM crap than not, so they’ll continue to play in full resolution moving forward.
At that point, why not just pirate and cut out the used disk middleman since the original creators aren't seeing any money from the purchase at that point anyway?
Borrowing from libraries sort of gives money to the creators, since the libraries seem to buy + dump lots of copies. Buying used gives the libraries money, since they dump the copies at the used store.
Alternatively, be like me, and have a $100 budget for N ~= 20 BluRays/40 DVDs. 2-3 can be new purchases if used isn't in stock.
Lip service to the law, in theory purchasing used discs supports original sales of new discs, and I at least sometimes prefer the discovery experience of physical browsing.
Honestly if you've bought (oh sorry "licensed") a movie, I'd have 0 problem torrenting what you've paid for vs dealing with these games. Companies just want forever subscriptions, not purchasing in any case.
I've noticed this with shorts. I'll go through 20 or so, check my YT history and Google treats the worst ones as a watched video. I'll spend less than a second as my brain processes the slop and then skip. Sure as shit they act like I watched the whole video and recommend me more. It has to be some sort of revenue scam, no customer advantage has appeared to me yet.
If you have YT Premium and start skipping ahead while an in video ad is playing, it helpfully provides a button to skip it. Still annoying, but much less so.
I watch stuff related to photography/cinematography, fishing (creeks), hobby electronics stuff, cars. That's most of it. Some makers like Hyperspace pirate. Travel videos like Japan Maibaru travel is good. Music recommendations, search a song and click on the "Song name + mix". The travel stuff I don't travel myself but the mood/atmosphere is great like Japanese towns near coast lines.
It's funny being a developer you don't watch much developer content like Primogen though I'm jealous these guys can just talk into a camera and make money. It is a skill to be likeable/mass appeal, being entertaining.
I already know the ad anyway, "this video is sponsored by SquareSpace". Bro I'm not going to use square space alright, I'm going to go into VS Code, make a SPA, host it on S3, buy a domain, connect the DNS, setup up ALB, CDN, setup RDS, cognito and then I'll have a website. Oh I also need github actions to do the build and push out the new changes.
Will throw this random comment in. Competition with the masses is hard. I paid a friend of mine $100 per song he produced for me (which were bad). But then I can go on Epidemic Sound and for $10/mo pick from a shit ton of good songs... how does a single creator compete with that.
Of course it depends on what kind of videos you watch. But videos themselves are becoming more ad filled and lower effort for me.
I mainly consume software, gaming, cooking and hardware news videos.
Huge portion of human effort going to ads is really sad