I’ve already been paying for YouTube Premium for many years to get rid of advertisement, and I’ve been using SponsorBlock for a year or so on my laptop to skip the inline ads, but because most of my watching of YouTube happens on the TV I always had to use the remote to skip it. It helps to see the “most rewind” area so you can fast forward to it, but it’s still very cumbersome.
Now a couple of days someone mentioned SmartTube on Lemmy and I installed it on my Chromecast with Google TV OS and oh boy is this software great! I did it to get SponsorBlock, but that is by far not the only feature I love about it.
- flexible time hiding the UI of a video (have it to 1 sec now)
- not showing UI when pausing
- way faster scrolling
- instant loading
- way faster account switching
- instant voice search
But there is one feature missing, changing the search language. We speak combined 7 languages at home and it’s impossible to search anything other than in English which is really annoying.
Anyway, check it out if you can on your TV.
Oh I agree that it’s terrible, and that’s what you should be expecting with ads, as a majority of the money goes towards funding the terrible YouTube experience. If you really want to support your content creators, send them money directly. $5 directly to them will improve their lives more than 3¢. If you don’t want to go as far as directly funding them, try patreon even.