‘I want to cancel’: YouTube Premium quietly hikes its US prices for the first time in three years, forcing many users to consider the unthinkable
2mon 8d ago by reddthat.com/u/throws_lemy in technology from www.techradar.com
"the unthinkable"
Hyperbole much?
Unthinkable is signing up in the first place
They though the titanic unthinkable until they hit an itheburg.
Incontheivable!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kwfA1UB2Je0
edit: Yes, I realize the irony of linking YouTube here.
thanks Mike Tyson
*Mike Tython
...why? The music platform is solid, and far better designed than Spotify. I've been a member since it was called 'Play Music'. And yeah, I've also had no ads but I signed up for the music service.
and assuming you can escape ADs, they will include ads and raise prices immediately, and people were touting how its better.
Was about to say the same. Unthinkable, I never even thought of subscribing in the first place!
Maybe watching ads is the unthinkable. It sure is for me, but I block them instead of paying.
Inconceivable!
Didn't come to mind.
They’re ’Muricans. You gotta give them some slack. Thinking doesn’t come naturally to them.
Sorry to interrupt the circlejerk, but the author is a Brit
I’ve made up my mind. Don’t confuse me with facts!
Here's your gun and passport welcome to America
Healthcare is not included
Fuck off.
Here I am using firefox and ublock or newpipe, I haven't seen a youtube ad in years. 🤷
I only see ads when I go to a friends house and they have that on the tv app blasting 1min ads every 5minutes.
Introduce them to SmartTube for Android TV
They don't care. I've tried with Vanced, blockers, DNS, everything. They'd rather just watch the ads. Blows my balls off.
Drives my crazy, and apparently throwing whatever i have in my hand; at a friend/relatives tv is not acceptable. Honestly and ad appears and it my instant reaction is to shut it the F up, and then usually to glare at whoever owns it like they are an idiot. I love hearing them explain why they pay tolerate it.
Friends with benefits, just not necessarily the good kind.
DNS ad blocking doesn't work on YouTube.
Is that different from smart tube for the phone, 'cause that app looks weird.
Should be this one SmartTube. Its a different client, so it doesn't look like the regular YouTube app, bug you can login and have your feed. It includes adblock and sponsorblock.
I use it on my Firestick and it's pretty much flawless.
I was going to comment this. Having super tech illiterate friends is painnnnnnn . they're so bad with tech.
And revanced for my phone
Revanced has been abandoned by a majority of maintainers who have all moved to Morphe. Would highly recommend
Good to know! Thanks for the heads up.
whoa wait what? what happened?
Allegedly, the "developers" of the app behave poorly towards "code contributors" who did large amounts of work for free, leading to those contributors leaving to start Morphe.
Later, ReVanced allegedly copied a lot of Morphe code without attribution, when the Morphe open source licence required attribution, with an alleged screenshot of the ReVanced discord channel showing a developer wanting to use AI to automatically copy Morphe code. The ReVanced subreddit also allegedly bans people who bring up Morphe.
Hey thanks for the read! I appreciate the information
I would recommend firefox + ublock origin also for phone. Install firefox, and though the menu add the extensions "video background play fix" and "ublock origin".
Last time I saw a youtube ad (on my devices) was when it was a small picture ad on the right side of the video.
They think delay before every video and "'experiencing interruptions? Find out why" banners are going to make me turn off my ubo. Good luck with that.
FoRcInG uSeRs To CoNsIdEr ThE uNtHiNkAbLe
Fuck off bootlickers
Lol, piracy, the logical solution.
There isn't a single device in my home that shows YouTube ads.
I'll jump through any hoop before I give that shit website money.
Aah, shit website but you still watch it… oh, the irony
Yup.
I think capitalism is shit but I'm still forced to participate in it. Until there is something better to use I'm stuck with YouTube.
Nobody is forcing you to consume content on the internet, this is a laughable defense. You aren't forced by society or capitalism to watch YouTube.
You're absolutely right.
However, if I can consume said content without giving money to companies who are going over and above to be anti-consumer? I'll 100% take advantage of that.
If YouTube wants to go out of their way to make it harder for me to watch legally, I'll go out of my way to watch illegally. You think I pay for 17 different streaming services for TV shows me or my partner want to watch? Fuck all that we pay for IPTV.
Pirates like me don't want to have to jump hoops to watch your shit. But all these streaming platforms, Youtube, Twitch, the greed has become so hard to ignore that it's impossible to rationalize paying them to fuck you anyway. Pay $18 a month for this service to watch this show, but this other show is on another service for another $16 a month. Fuck all that I'll just open up whichever pirating site I have saved and download the fucking show in a half hour and toss it on my external HDD and watch it anyway.
I have no respect for companies that don't respect their consumers.
I can respect the honesty that you just want shit for free at least lol
I can't stand people that try to pretend that they're taking a moral stand when they just don't want to pay people for the work they consume.
There's Peertube, Vimeo, and others
Okay. Let me know when the dozens of content creators I follow on YouTube migrate there.
"Content creators" lol. I mean, I guess there could be, but YT stopped being decent about 10 years ago, maybe longer. I haven't used it but for an occasional video. Surprisingly, I haven't missed it. There's not much on YouTube I couldn't get elsewhere, with less ads, and to the point vs a 10 minute video intro plus sponsor plugs, etc.
What kind of content do you watch? Some of the stuff I enjoy watching I can definitely get my fix from elsewhere (educational, food/cooking/recipes, tech news); some of it is very person-specific so I would miss out on their specific views on things but I still would have other sources to turn to if I could disregard that (essays, reviews, comedy); and some of it is like 'well my choices are basically youtube or twitch' (let's plays/other video game content)
(EDIT: Reviews not News. I hate watching most news tbh.)
I just kind of forego any content. I used to watch silly stuff like the Electroboom guy, Linux Tech tips A LONG time ago when it felt more personable and meaningful. My son watches carwow or something, doing car comparisons sort of how Top gear used to, but I'm not into it as I can't afford those nice cars lol.
Tech review stuff gets under my skin bc it's so much promotion of sponsors, their channels, and they're always begging for likes and subscribes... 🤮 plus they're often biased. I know there's a large audience to cater to but I feel often times I'm more, product and feature aware than they are, but I'm also obsessed with technology, FOSS, self-hosting, etc.
Lmao
Yet you participate in society. Curious.
I don’t think that soviety is shit. I think we have done wonderful things in society. And we keep making it better. Every society has its problems, but there is a way to make them better.
Without society there wouldn’t be literature, medicine, knowlidge, science, etc.
Yes, there are bad things also, but as I said, we can and must make them better. And if you watch in the long run through history there is no better time to be living than now.
And when they try to force online ID bullshit I'll permanently walk away. We don't deserve the WWW if its just full of scammers. I'd rather rewatch my favorite anime for the millionth time.
And the unthinkable is as blockers. Wow
Arrrrr
Dramatic much? Canceling a subscription is 'the unthinkable' now? For fuck's sake.
forcing many users to consider the unthinkable "Do I really need 300 subscriptions?"
Haha yeah. It’s unthinkable that YouTube doesn’t make ANOTHER billion dollars.
Not aiding capitalism by canceling a subscription = suicide
forcing many users to consider the unthinkable
.... Death???
Prostitution
Woah.. Morbid much?
The answer is obvious. Going outside.
Avada Kedavra!
Honestly I would probably pay for it and be happy but Premium doesn't solve many of the problems that still exist:
- being shown the same content over and over
- Dislikes hidden
- in-video ads
- Shorts absolutely crammed down your throat everywhere
- broken search results
- AI-generated slop absolutely everywhere
- crypto spam
- Google-connected account using view history to spy on you
etc. etc. All problems Google could solve easily but simply won't.
They finally lost me completely when I loaded a music video marked "adult" for language and it demanded I upload ID on an account that was legally an adult.
I made that account in 1999, it's not even from this millennium, and they still derp out on it. I'm getting close to 50, at this point, and the only thing ads, age verification, and extreme right wing content on top of state sponsored disinformation campaigns will get you is a blacklist.
We should have seen it coming, I mean they used to have the "Don't be evil" motto, removing that was a declaration of intent.
I pay for YouTube and they wouldn't accept the card I pay them with for validation.
So I took a photo of someone in a YouTube video and they accepted it as me and hey now I'm verified.
Cards are their own issue...
I had a bank that would always deny my purchase of a game with fraud detection, though I suspect it was because GOG was still banking in Gibraltar then, but then my card was actually stolen and they just let them spend $5 at every store in town until I was overdrawn by the maximum they allowed.
Considering YT didn't even start until 2005, I call BS 😁. Not to mention I don't think they would've had accounts from the get go unless you wanted to upload videos.
They probably mean their google account
Gmail didn't exist until 2004 or so. Google back then was a search engine in 1998 so there'd be no need for an "account"in the sense it's used today. I mean, they're probably not wrong claiming they have a Google account old enough to be legal since it'd only need to be from 2008 to be 18, and there was Gmail, YouTube, and Android (later on) by then.
Definitely an adult account, I have kids who are adults, and I had been on Google since I used to use it at the public library. I seem to remember there being a different version of mail from them, before GMail, that was converted when they did the big release. I could be wrong, it's been nearly thirty years, but I was very relieved to be able to get off Yahoo which only released one good product (Answers, by the way) in the history of ever.
I also started with Android using my account long enough ago to be "adult" as I was using a HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) running Android 1.0 released in 2008, moving from my brief foray into Blackberry from Palm to them and staying through the Galaxy Note 8. Now I use WayDroid to run a few Android apps, Google has just gotten too creepy, and they do derpy things like make me need to fiddle with workarounds to access my files on my device and now they're pushing the signing for Android trying to kill (or at least data harvest) alternative stores.
Get Revanced and you can also block shorts from the UI completely, on top of no ads
Yes, that was my entire point.
I have like 8 or 9 plugins for Firefox and just to make YouTube remotely usable. That doesn't account for the 8 or 9 more on top of that to make the internet remote usable.
Morphe fixes most of that.
Well that's exactly my point.
What is Morphe?
So the people making Revanced had an argument....
They split..morphe is a hard fork without a certain reddit mod....
IMO, the real talent has abandoned ship and are now producing Morphe.
It's just like (re)vanced. It's designed to patch apps so they work more how you want them to.
Interesting, thanks for the context
Soooo true. What service are you even paying for, they change their business focus and now you get shorts. The best way to viee youtube is with an ad free frontend.
You can get rid of the actually relevant issues with premium and giving negative reactions to unwanted content. I barely get shown AI stuff.
You can't though. That was my entire point.
Well, I can.
in-video ads
They do actually have an in-built skip for this. It's not as good as sponsor block though
The 'unthinkable' of installing an adblocker or using a frontend?
How do you think the unthinkable? With an ithberg.
The unthinkable? lmao
me: can we have ad free videos with uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock?
google: we have ad free videos at home.
at home: YouTube Premium
Lmao, you want to have a good laugh, read through the reddit comments on this. Full of corpo bootlickers talking about how poor Google needs to make money, why won't you think of the corpos??
Probably bots trying to trick people into thinking it's absurd and bad and all that.
I must be stupid, because I can never tell.
Are mice stupid for falling into traps designed for them?
You're not stupid, you just need to learn done telltale signs. Most the time, for me, it's post history.
There is an assumption these people are making that I am not sure they are aware they are making. They are assuming the cost of running YouTube is increasing so the cost of YouTube premium needs to increase. Every public company is driven by maximizing share holder value, the goal is to extract as much money as possible from the user.
If I’m paying, it will be to nebula. YouTube is toxic.
I like nebula but I kinda miss having comments under the video. The negative comments can be overwhelming but I like seeing if other commenters noticed the same things I did and if the creator has responded to them.
Now is the time for peertube to shine
I miss the days when companies would grandfather your price in, so price hikes only effected new users... Now days everyone pays.
Those days were brief if they ever existed. It’s actually pretty common to offer new users even sweeter deals for joining, and zero promotions to get loyal users to stay.
Yeah but we are seeing the opposite of that right now with Netflix raising their base rates, short term promotions are what new users get these days.
Cell phone plans, software, other subscription services have definitely kept user rates locked in despite rising base rates.
forcing many users to consider the unthinkable
Use a firefox clone and ublock?
(and linux, btw)
I scrape from the command line, Google doesn't even tough a web browser, leech the webm/webp/whatever content and transcode it into mkv/mp3 to watch locally, offline, with no ads or tracking.
Why is everything being done "quietly" lately?
Because its a covering instead of saying underhanded or sneaky or tricking users.
"I didn't steal, I was just quietly sneaking money from their wallet!"
Announcing price hikes is bad marketing
I'm speaking more of the reporting. It seems like every headline claims something is being done "quietly" now when it was actually announced loud and clear. Take this price hike, for example. I got an email from Google last week telling me the price went up. That wasn't "quietly". "Quietly" would be raising the price completely unannounced and hoping no one notices.
The answer is simple: the site that published the article is complete garbage
laughs in:
NewPipe
Tubular
PipePipe
FreeTube
SkyTube
You have to frequently do some shenanigans to get things working because shit keeps breaking. I still do it, but it's honestly annoying AF that i need to tinker with my apps like that all the time.
Shenanigans like, downloading an update? 😱
No, like fiddling with proxies to find a working one...if only it was just updating then I wouldn't mind.
I've never had to do that on all three devices I watch YouTube on.
YouTube wasn't loading videos on my phone Today so I opened Revanced. It said there was an update available to I clicked the update button. It installed the update and YouTube plays again.
Not exactly rocket science.
I've been using freetube for a little over a year, and I have to change something all the time (like every third time i open the app or something) otherwise videos just throw an error and won't load. Same goes for my laptop (also freetube). Newpipe and revanced are even worse for me and some I never got working.
My PC is just Firefox with uBlock. I don't remember the last time I had an issue. Maybe last summer?
My phone is Revanced. As I said videos weren't loading. I went into the manager and it said there was an update available. I clicked Download. It asked if I wanted to install it. I clicked Install. Videos now load perfectly fine on my phone.
I use SmartTube on my Firestick for my TV. I've had one issue since I downloaded it last fall. A quick google/reddit search brought up an update a day or two before. Someone had the Downloader number. Open firestick, open Downloader app, put in number, download updated Smarttube, youtube worked perfectly.
Nothing I've done has taken more than a couple minutes at most to update if anything went awry. I think in the little over 8 months I've been using these I've maybe had a grand total of 4 times I had to update something. I'd have spent more time watching an unskippable ad than it took to update my phone's Revanced this morning.
Revanced took me a little bit to get working on my phone the first time I was trying to get it set up. I watched a youtube tutorial (Ironic I know) how to get it set up and once it was working all I've had to do was update the manager from time to time, which I can do in-app.
Ok so we just have starkly dissimilar experiences, unfortunately for me it has been way more hassle than what you have experienced.
FreeTube has been going strong for me.
I'd gladly pay them about $10 a month for a family plan.
At that point, maintaining AdBlocker updates on half a dozen different platforms would be more pain than the money.
But let's be honest, they're not putting out Netflix and Disney quality content, it's just 5-9's of slop with an occasional diamond of a creator.
at $27 a month, and a trajectory over time to be more expensive than cable, they can fuck right off.
unthinkable? Coordinate an attack to kidnap families of high executives?
tell me about it; I'm paying double for revanced now
So glad PipePipe and FreeTube are a thing
For now....
I would like to add an honourable mention to your list here: Kodi YouTube add-on. Somehow this is working for me again after being broken for ages. It's not the same (you need to use a Google account and API set-up) but no ads, auto play, recommend videos..
http://grayjay.app/no Google accounts, no bullshit
Looks promising. It would work fine if I don't want to login with Google? Does it run ads like YouTube? I see they plan to support a couple hosts, which is cool, one application for all media streaming.
I I received the email today telling me that they were going to raise the price of my family plan by $4 per month. I'm guessing that their costs have not increased in any way, and probably have decreased. I assume it's just another squeeze tactic from the company that used to not be evil.
I imagine costs have increased (more expensive server components due to ai shortages, more users to stream to, ever-increasing storage for the unthinkable amount of video that gets uploaded to YouTube nonstop). I imagine Google going all in on ai (infinite negative money glitch) costs a lot and they're trying to cover the costs elsewhere so the investor report doesn't look so bad and spook stockholders into selling. I'd keep an eye on other Google services to see if their prices also go up over the coming months.
I think its likely the codex price hike, not Ai
Most of their servers are processing and multiencoding with h264/h265, and even if people are moving away from that for av1 they have such a massive platform that they still have to utilize it even when most have moved on
Ill rerespond to this to a link to exactly what im talking about if I remember
That only applies to new contracts from what I heard, not to existing contracts. Google certainly has a long term contract that wouldn't be affected by the increased royalties for new H.264 contracts.
Oh, come now... You really telling me you think they or any other multi-billion dollar corp won't frontload the costs and pocket the difference?
Or 'ease' the price increase in over a few quarters so that its not met with as harsh of backlash?
You're really telling me the Eiffel Tower isn't real? Why would you type those words?
Not defending Google, but how many employees do they have? Did they all get raises this year? I bet license deals from the music industry probably went up too. (No proof but assuming)
But I agree 100%, they are without a doubt no longer following "don't be evil". But it's disingenuous to believe they're annual costs are not increasing along with literally everything else.
I wasn't being disingenuous and I just validated my assumptions.
The cost of compute per million instructions has continued to decrease. The cost of storage on HDD has also continued to decrease, albeit more slowly. The cost of NAND storage has increased due to the supply crunch that Google helped create. Average pay at Google has gone up 5% over the past two years, but this is offset at least in part by mass layoffs. License fees for music have remained stagnant.
While a lot of those things are arguable one way or another, depending on whose numbers you look at and what specific details you want to focus on, one thing is not. Google's profits have nearly doubled in the past 3 years. There is no reason for a price increase beyond corporate greed.
Unsubscribing and installing UBlock Origin is perfectly thinkable. It also gets which side is the "dark side" wrong.
Maybe because im a millennial but it's easier than ever to have all the music you could ever want downloaded and playing off local storage, idk i don't get it i guess it sucks listening to some online playlist and every few songs one is just stuff you'd never choose to listen to.
Funny, I'm a Gen X - and I have everything locally stored and with over 400 gb of music commercial free. -I could just put the whole thing on shuffle for the next few years. Still sometimes listen to ad supported Spotify tho as am used to radio.
400 GB?
That's some amateur numbers.
I got FLACs bigger than that.
Loool, I think about cancelling stuff all the time.
Hell I think I'll go cancel something right now.
Okay, but they are not just paying more for the same service. YouTube Premium is worth more now because it allows you to avoid 90 second unstoppable ads. So don't say Google doesn't do anything for its consumers customers!
I havent seen an ad on YT in like 2 years and i havent had premium in 3 years
Tell us your secret, sourcerer
Depends on where you're watching YouTube, but there's options for most devices. On PC you can use an ad blocker such as uBlock Origin, or a browser with a built in ad blocker like Brave. If you use a phone you can use the mobile browser version (not perfect but pretty serviceable) with a browser that blocks ads. There's app options for Android such as Greyjay, and modded YouTube apps such as Revanced and Morphe. There's an app called SmartTube Next that works on most smart TVs. If you have a VPN, setting it to Albania will cause ads to not be displayed on most services even if you're using the official app and works on every device I've tried it on. There's probably more ways but those are what I'm aware off the top of my head. There is no reason that in 2026 anyone should be seeing ads on YouTube.
For me the unthinkable is giving my hard earned money to a multi billion dollar corporation
"For the first time in three years" is a weird way to phrase regular price increases.
It's even worse than that. They increase the price right after they increase the ad length. As in "well, now that ads are longer, this subscription has more value. Therefore we should increase the price".
THE UNTHINKABLE! Not paying for trumping trumpy service or goods. We should pay for things no matter how bad they are of course.
Also check out what they’re doing if you happened to pay through Apple….
Makes sense. Never pay through Apple if there's any other option. Can't fault Google for that.
But even then, $16 per month for Youtube!? An adblocker is cheaper.
Thats because apple adds 30% if you buy through the ios app.
30%
Every. Single. Month. F O R E V E R.
For providing absolutely nothing
Why doesn't Google just pay it and absorb the cost like shippers do with tariffs?
/s
Yeah, it's... interesting. Especially with donations.
Apple takes a 30% cut, then Google does so as well from the remainder.
Feeling generous? Congrats, more than a half goes to corporations.
Ah good point!
Cancelation unthinkable? Maybe to the posters. Otherwise I can't see any reason to dread canceling
I always wanted to get back into books. It's actually really helpful that they're doing this. I'm still pretty bad at self control.
They believe creator should be paid. That's about it.
Theoretically it lets you skip the occasions when Noutube/[insert youtube front end]/uBlock origin has issues blocking youtube ads, but that's rare nowadays.
You can also download videos, for offline playback.
I can do that without paying tho.
I’m not saying it is a good value, just that it is one of the features. So just before a flight you can click download on a bunch of videos on your devices. That can be done otherwise, but not quite as simply on mobile devices as one click.
Speaking for everyone?
I pay because I use yt music and my PRIMARY tv watching is YT, and I use one or the other all day long.
YT has no ads, and I can skip with the press of a button most creator ads so it's kinda nice and easy. (Yes I know what sponsor block is and it's installed on Firefox so one less button press on my pc)
Do I pay YouTube FOR the creators? Nope I pay so I can sign in / watch yt or listen to my music anywhere without jumping through hoops.
I also have / sometimes use grayjay on my phone (and I paid futo for it to support it) I have smart tube next on my Nvidia shield too. My wife/son use it mostly.
I sync yt music to my Garmin watch for running, I run about 20 miles a week so add that to feature I'm paying for.
I downloaded a handful of videos before flying to CA earlier this week, but the flights had WiFi so that didn't really give me anything special ;)
Can I do all this without paying, sure, but I don't mind paying for stuff I get value from.
Am I happy about $4/mo increase? Absolutely not, but it's not gonna break me either. $4/30 is .13c a day.
Are there any real advantages?
-
No 5 seconds forced delay when using ad blockers
-
Higher bitrates available
-
Ad blockers don't work on Chromecast, other solutions don't offer easy casting from the phone app
-
Better value than audio only services like Spotify
Revanced never offered above 1080p for me.
Morphe is generally offering 1440 and 2160, if available.
Videos that stop at 1080p often have an increased bitrate option with Premium (no idea how YT decides when to offer it). 1440p and 4k are available to all without Premium.
Also to note are regional pricing differences. Let's for example compare US and Ukraine pricing:
| Plan | United States of America | Ukraine (converted to USD) | Ukraine (UAH) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student | $8.99 | ~$1.36 | ₴59 |
| Individual | $15.99 | ~$2.28 | ₴99 |
| Family | $26.99 | ~$3.43 | ₴149 |
Though I don't know how much that would seem over there.
But anyway, I pay $1.99 for DNS (NextDNS), so $2.28 for streaming high quality video without ads? Sure, would seem fine.
I wonder how much cost difference there is on the Google side between the regions.
Is this a good moment to post a link to revanced?
I thought revanced died?
Vanced died, ReVanced is alive and...there's internal conflicts but it's working
Oh no, poor Vance. How his mother holding up? When's the funeral?
Yeah if you have to compare a service with Netflix, and Netflix comes out as the better value proposition, the other service is doing something really wrong.
Where did all those price tiers come from?
I remember YT red, which became premium, and included both music and Youtube.
TIL there is a Music Premium that just gives you music.... But YouTube Music is just YouTube with a fancy frontend.
And the price hikes, wow, I signed up for 7.99/mo and remember it becoming 9.99/mo. I completely missed the 13.99/mo price hike.
I have a reminder to cancel before the increase. It was, imo, a good deal for no ads, bolstered creator support in YT (Premium views were worth more than free, iirc), and to get YT Music, which I liked more than Spotify.
For $16/mo, I'll set up ad-free options for YT and I'll figure something out for music.
I like the app spotube. It uses the Spotify api to index music and then pulls the data from youtube ad free. It's foss and on Fdroid
Nooooooted. Hell yeah
Tidal is quite good for music. The selection is missing stuff at times, but that usually doesn't last long since I'm pretty sure that only happens when there's some kind of contract renegotiation or something.
I've heard of it, it's on my list. My only real qualm is that I want a good "radio". I don't do play lists, I just hit Supermix on YT and let it play through. Spotify tried to give me the "average" of all my liked songs, so I'd end up with a Playlist that repeated the same 50 songs or so. YT Music seemed to give me varied music at a similar ratio of my liked genres, which was exactly what I wanted.
Does it have a radio function similar to that?
It does, though it's not exactly front and center on certain apps. For instance, in my car, I had to scroll most of the way down the main screen to find the radio stations. They are very good, though. They give a decent mix of stuff you've favorited and things you've never heard before, with the notable exception of the Steven Wilson radio station, which plays almost exclusively bands that Steven Wilson has been in, which alone is more than enough to fill up a whole radio station.
Interesting. I'm fine if I gotta scroll a bit, I usually set it up before I leave. I'll give it a look!
I think there's a free trial of the HiFi version, which is what I have. Sound quality is significantly better than other services, since I'm pretty sure they use FLAC when it's available, and high-bitrate MP3 (I think) for their low-bandwidth mode. Either way, their lowest-quality encoding settings are better than Spotify's old top-tier ones.
I'll be honest, it could be recorded through a tin can and I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference lol. As long as it shows me new songs every now and then, and gives me varied radio playlists, I'm happy.
What's the free music streaming service you use that has no ads? I'd like to try it, I'm obviously in the market.
Lmao buddy resorts to this and then blocks me. What a small human.
👀
More like noted to check out further, but it looks promising! Big question is functionality with Android Auto, which if it's just a website, would be unlikely, but still good to have for home use! It has new releases I'd be looking for on it already too, one album literally came out yesterday and it's on there.
Will do!
Interesting, this seems to be a way to stream from Tidal without using a tidal account. I wonder how long that will work, because surely Tidal considers it a hostile way to access their service.
Aaaannd it's dead. Lol
I've been building up a collection though, so if it works as a "bring your own collection" service it might be useful to me yet.
Look, its an edgelord!
Yeah, but that money actually goes to the artists. It's got one of the best rates for that out of all the streaming services.
I do as well, and that'll be the hardest thing to lose, if I can't find a good equivalent. Cause I have to swap back and forth from Android Auto to the BT player otherwise, and that suuuuuucks.
YouTube revanced 👌👌
You might want to check out Morphe.
I think the days of Revanced are numbered....
Will do thanks !
Thanks for the reminder, just canceled my 2-month free trial with a few days to spare.
Adblock has been my wingman for years!
It may seem unthinkable, believe me, it is not.
Lol, the poor suckers who ever paid for premium in the first place.
Why do people give their money to google? Just use adblock
ad block just pauses while ads play unseen. better than paying for skips >.> amazon
Do yall even adblocker? I’ve not seen a yt ad in years.
I do! One of my friends added me to his plan last year to watch football, and the only benefit I can see is the higher bitrates offered. The plain 1080p option without a plan looks like ass.
Not defending the cost of youtube premium (I don't even buy it, myself). It's just a little extra thing I've noticed after the use of ublock.
However, I think I have seen a Firefox extension to help with bitrates, recently...
Selling higher bitrates is a joke.
Many people use it on TVs or phones and tablets, not computers. Which makes ad blocking harder or impossible.
Android tv has an app called smart tube next which blocks ads on yt. No idea about iOS though. Though not entirely convenient, you could use Orion browser with ublock origin installed
Firetv it works. But can't get it on Roku. But again, most people have no clue about that.
year of the Linux TVs or phones and tablets? also those ARE computers
Yes everything is a computer. However not everything can be run installed configured or used as a computer. Some of them are very limited devices.
there's no point to have phones and tablets and TVs be locked down
yes, ublock
but i watch youtube through invidious anyway
Thats a lot of money.
Can someone in this thread tell me how to get an ad blocker on my tv?
https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
If you're asking more generally there's pihole but YouTube delivers ads the same way as videos so it won't work for that.
Anyone know how to make YouTube ad free on an LG TV?
Install downloader, then download and install SmartTube.
Thanks
I remember when they promised that anyone who paid for YouTube Red would be allowed to pay for YouTube Premium for the same price until the sun explodes.
And then they scrapped it.
It wasn't a surprise. But I was disappointed.
Lol haven't paid for their services and still enjoying premium. Suck it Google.
"unthinkable"???
If you want to also make a political statement out of unsubscribing, check out
What's the point of YouTube premium again? uBlock Origin works on laptops, tablets, and phones. Smart Tube works on TVs.
Is there some live sports thing that it's bundled with or something?
I feel special, now.
Morphe to the rescue.
I want to cancel
Well until you do. They're going to keep doing this. ???
I use a chromecast and, good golly, the number of times I get 90+ second ads is insane. I downloaded nebula the other day and, once I finally get my fill of avgn in the next week or so, I’m leaving and never looking back.
What is the point of premium except for not having ads anyway?
If you watch for hours a day no ads is a big thing. Otherwise you get at least one ad per video if not more. Plus you get yt music with premium. Plus you can skip ahead over sponsor stuff in videos too.
All of these things are achievable without paying YouTube.
This is not worth paying so much money as they are, asking for.
I literally watch for hours a day on my second monitor in my office. I also have a YouTuber who I just let run overnight on my tv as background noise.
Neither my pc or tv shows ads, and I don't have premium.
Being able to download both videos and music is a big one, it saves me a lot of mobile data.
I use 3d party indie apps for it. For free or for much cheaper.
Don't need it if you use the Brave browser.
And if you don’t want spyware on your machine you use AdGuardHome or PiHole