Amazon prime! A paid service with advertisements for the original content no one wants to watch.

You know something went wrong when I've got an Amazon Prime account, but I still pirate any of their video content that I want to watch.

I do exactly same, even uninstalled their shitty tv app which managed to be stay slower than other streaming apps for many years, even on fire tv stick.

Yeah, I basically never watch it anymore on account of the ads. Perhaps that was their goal: to reduce content licensing costs.

I never understood this with cable TV either. You could use an antenna and watch TV over the air (with ads) or you could pay for cable and still watch ads!

Before streaming, if you didn't live in a large metro area, cable got you a good clear picture and more than one or two channels. That was the selling point for it when I was a kid. With OTA reception we would have had two channels with a clear picture and maybe two or three more with a lot of static/snow.

Cable just carried regular broadcast channels back then. The value you paid for was more channels and better picture, not avoiding ads. HBO was the first premium add-on, and it didn't have ads.

Some people set up a big dish antenna in their yard so they could get content directly off the satellite backhaul. This might not have had ads but it was a fairly big investment and you had to be sort of an AV geek to use it.

Cable at least made sense on paper (if not obvious to the consumer). The channels were independent companies, they pay for the rights to content and get paid by ads. But they had the problem of how to actually get their feed into your home (over the air broadcast was the only D2C option).

The cable provider was just a delivery mechanism. So you pay them to deliver the feeds. But they didn’t get any revenue from the content providers (or their ads).

In other words, two different companies, two different services (content vs delivery), and two different revenue models.

No Lite! about it. I've twice unsubbed from YTP because they started showing me ads. Never again.

I've never seen an ad logged in to Premium. Content creators do sometimes insert sponsor segments directly into the video, but YTP offers a skip feature that works fairly well.

They do sneak it in when a blog etc plays an embedded YT video. It treats that as non-signed-in, you have to stop playing and continue on YT to avoid ads in that scenario.

I've seen ads on the YT app for the nVidia Shield TV in multiple places. Sometimes ad-roll before/during a video sometimes as the first result in a search.