Youtube shows huge amount of ads. If you don’t want to buy the Premium, there’s no way you can block those ads on Apple TV. Or is there…
Tldr
The problem
I watch quite a lot of Youtube and I mostly watch on Apple TV. But nowdays Youtube shows huge amounts of ads. On computer or mobile or iPad you can use a browser (other than Google Chrome) with an ad blocker to watch Youtube. But you can’t do that on Apple TV, because there’s no browsers for Apple TV. I don’t want to waste so much time to watch ads, so I subscribed to Youtube Premium Lite. It was great. The only feature was no ads and the price was reasonable. But then they cancelled the Lite, and I had to subscribe to the full Premium. It gives a lot of features in a lot higher price. But I only wanted to watch Youtube ad-free, so it felt quite expensive to pay the full price for features I wasn’t using. So I had to figure out something else to watch ad-free Youtube.
But should you do it? Should you use Youtube free without ads? Let’s think about that later in the article.
The solution
Now, let’s dive deeper into my solution to ad and tracking free Youtube on Apple TV. It consist of two parts, so it’s quite a lot more complicated than just using the Youtube app and paying the premium.
Invidious
Invidious is an alternative front-end to Youtube. It doesn’t show ads or track you. You can host your own private Invidious instance by yourself on your own computer, or you can use one of the public instances. You can use it without an account, but you can’t use it with your Youtube account. You can create an Invidious account and import your Youtube subscriptions to Invidious.
The user experience is not quite as good as with real Youtube. For example Invidious might lack some video quality options. Also Youtube cards and end-screens are missing. You can see the comments, but you can’t post a comment, because you are not using your Youtube account. But there’s no ads nor tracking. And that’s the big reason why people use Invidious.
Youtube and Google are trying their best to block Invidious instances and other similar apps to get access to Youtube content. I’ve noticed public instances are more prone to blocking than private instances. So I would recommend you host your own instance. At least for me it’s been working just fine. Just make sure you have configured your instance correctly for everything to work in the next step. Make sure to use https and specify your domain in the Invidious settings.
Invidious doesn’t have an app, so you need to use a browser or 3rd party app to use it. And Apple TV doesn’t have a browser so you need…
Yattee
Yattee is a video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS. You can play content from your device or you can set an Invidious instance as a ”Location” in Yattee to watch Youtube videos. You can log in with your Invidious account to get your subscription feed.
Yattee still has some bugs, but I recommend you join the Apple TestFlight program to get the latest version of Yattee with some of the bugs fixed. You just first need to join the TestFlight with some other device before you can download the TestFlight version for your Apple TV.
This setup has some limitations. Yattee syncs subscriptions and playlists with Invidious, but it doesn’t sync play history. So if you use Yattee on multiple devices, the play history is not synced between devices. I think the sync between Yattee and Invidious could be implemented, but the developers just haven’t done it yet. Also nothing is synced with Youtube.
The Youtube algorithm is missing as well. Both Yattee and Invidious can show you list of videos related to the one you are currently watching. They also show you a feed of popular videos on your Invidious instance and trending videos on Youtube. But they can’t recommend you videos to watch based on your watch history. So finding new videos or channels to watch outside of your subscriptions is more difficult.
Yattee uses different backend than Invidious to play videos, so it usually gives more quality options compared to Invidious. For example Yattee can play 4k quality even when Invidious doesn’t. But at least on my 1st gen 4k Apple TV the 4k quality is pretty useles. There’s no hardware decoder for Youtube 4k video format on Apple TV (or Apple doesn’t allow to use it), so Yattee has to use software decoder, which needs more processor power than my old Apple TV has to offer. That results to dropped frames and jerky video. But 1080p quality works flawlesly and my old 1080p tv can’t even show higher resolution than that.
Update: Latest TestFlight versions seems to work better with 4k content and it seems like my old Apple TV might actually handle the higher resolution now. I’ll keep testing it and tweaking the settings to see if it really works.
Yattee has quite a lot of settings and things to tweak, so you need to spend some time with it to make it fit your needs. Meaning that it might not work for you out of the box. Also same thing with comments, you can see them (not on Apple TV, though) but not post them.
Conclusion
This Invidious + Yattee combination works well for me. I know this might not be the best solution for everyone, because this is more complicated than just using the Youtube app and this solution has some drawbacks as mentioned before. But at least both of them are free and open source (FOSS) programs.
Should you try to use Youtube without ads and for free?
That is a good question. You should consider the fact that running a streaming service like Youtube is not free. Youtube is probably the largest streaming service on the internet and you can just imagine how much bandwith it needs. And that bandwith is not cheap. Neither is the storage to store all the contents on multiple servers around the world. So they really need to make some money to keep the service running.
But on the otherhand I don’t like how they track and profile their users through ads.
Then there are the creators. When Youtube shows ads, it shares some of the ad revenue with the creators. By not watching ads do you reduce the amount of revenue the creators get? Maybe, but not by much. The amount of money a creator gets from one ad shown is insignificant. And almost all of the creators who are doing Youtube as their full time job has revenue sources other than Youtube partner program, because it’s just not reliable enough source. But you definietly should support the creators you like. Not by watching ads, because that’s stupid. But maybe check if they have Patreon or something like that or buy their merch or products. That’s how they can keep making more content for you to watch.