By Joe Rosensteel
April 18, 2024 2:42 PM PT
Does everything need to be an ad?
Increasingly, every pixel in front of our eyes is fought over by a pool of large technology companies that are trying to squeeze fractions of cents out of ads and promotions.
There’s a lack of care and thoughtfulness about all of these moves. Instead, there’s just an assumption that as long as they can pry someone’s eyes open, “Clockwork Orange”-style, then they’ve helped activate those reluctant viewers with brands.
Last week, YouTube rolled out a new version of its app for Apple TV. It overrides the screensaver by starting a slideshow just before the Apple TV’s screensaver is supposed to come on. If you’re watching a video, it’ll be an endless loop zooming into the video’s thumbnail and fading to black. If you were just paused somewhere in the app’s interface, it’ll be stills taken from a random assortment of YouTube videos on nature, or stills from drone footage.
The YouTube logo is burned in to the upper left as a static image in white, and a graphic for the directional pad with the “up” arrow highlighted in white appears in the bottom right corner. You can hit the up button to resume that paused video (instead of just pushing play???) or, if it’s one of the heavily compressed video stills, it’ll take you to that video of drone footage and start playing it.
Fortunately, when I complained about this on Mastodon, Rob Bhalla got in touch and told me that he fixed it by changing the Apple TV screensaver timing to start at two minutes, instead of the default five. Sure enough, that makes the screensaver start before the slideshow can, because YouTube has no idea what your Apple TV’s screensaver settings are. They just guessed that most people will leave them at the default, and hard coded that timing in for their slideshow.
YouTube’s not doing this out of concern over screen-burn-in. (Those static white graphics prove that.) And they don’t have a better screensaver. YouTube’s screensaver has no settings, because this isn’t for you to control. YouTube is undoubtedly staking out real estate so they can inject advertising and promotion into it at a later date. (No, YouTube hasn’t said that the screensaver is a future home of ads, but there’s absolutely no other reason to add this feature.)
Even if you have the ad-free YouTube Premium, like I do, you’ll see the screen stealer. It seems like it was something that’s been tested for a while, with some users reporting that they saw it months ago, not just in the most recent app release. But now everyone I’ve talked to on the current version is being subjected to it.
The pause that advertises
Roku was in the news just the other week when Janko Rottgers came across a patent that they filed to inject ads from the display device (meaning a TV with Roku software) over paused video streams from input sources, like an Apple TV.
Roku already boasts about selling ad placement in their cityscape screensaver, and offered a branded takeover of the screensaver for “Barbie” last summer.
Imagine a future where Roku injects ads over the YouTube app injecting ads. Will there be a cat-and-mouse game over who gets to sell access to the screen you paused when you went to the bathroom?
Meanwhile, those whiz kids in Redmond are testing out using the Windows Start menu to promote apps. From Tom Warren at The Verge:
Microsoft started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment in beta versions of Windows 11. Microsoft has been experimenting with ads inside Windows for more than 10 years. There are already promotional spots on the Windows 10 lock screen and in the Start menu, so it’s not exactly surprising to see them appear in Windows 11, too.
Classy, classy stuff.
It’s hardly necessary to recount, but Amazon does some pretty sketchy stuff in its quest for money. Jason Snell and I have both removed the Amazon Echo Show from our lives because the things are haunted by noisy, intrusive offers that outweigh their utility.
Amazon also executed the most brazen maneuver out of all the others when they flipped the switch this year on every Prime subscriber getting ads in Prime Video unless those users paid more. A brilliant move when they have a captive audience.
Petites pommes de terre
All those companies look terrible. Not like those saints over at Apple. They certainly haven’t junked up the experience of using their devices in the pursuit of small potatoes.
Using Apple devices without Apple services is subpar, and Apple will take every opportunity to make you aware of that, on every Apple Device that you own. From their perspective this promotion is first party, and it has something that’s like truth to it. Close enough.
Let’s circle back to the Apple TV. The tvOS updates have gradually started to beef up emphasis on the TV app as place to go for your TV-watching needs. However, that’s only true if you really want to watch the Apple TV+ shows that Apple is currently promoting.
If you launch the app after an OS update, and you’re not a current subscriber, you get whisked to the Apple TV+ tab where you will get autoplaying video, and spiel about all the great Apple TV+ content you’re missing out on. This happens every time there’s a point update.
If you go to the Home section of the TV app, you’ll get the same carousel sales pitch for Apple TV+ shows that you’d get if you were in the Apple TV+ section. It’s not left to stand on its own. Apple doesn’t trust you to pay enough attention to them.
TV+ isn’t playing hard to get, or trying to lure me back with mystery. It all just turns into interface noise, frustrating what I want to do. This screen real estate belongs to Apple, not to me.
Just like all these other companies shoving promotions in, Apple doesn’t think it’s a villain. It thinks it’s increasing awareness and fostering discovery! (Never mind that if you are an Apple TV+ subscriber, you’ll see shows in the carousel that you’ve already watched.)
After all, Apple TV+ shows and movies are critically acclaimed, darlings, especially Argylle. If what you want to watch doesn’t fit into that category, that’s your problem, not Apple’s.
Apple is on the verge of launching their ad-supported Apple TV+ tier. I doubt that they’ll be as bold as Amazon when they do, but they’re not going to be quiet about how much they’d like you to subscribe to the ad-supported tier.
Apple Music? Well, there’s not a lot to differentiate it from other music streaming services, but if you don’t sign up, good luck with the app. There don’t seem to be ad-supported plans, but promoting Music itself is the killer ad, really.
The News app that exists to promote Apple News+? That’s a harder sell, because there’s absolutely nothing critically acclaimed about News+. It might have something that’s critically acclaimed buried in the interface somewhere, but they can hardly take credit for that. They can take credit for spamming everyone about the crossword.
The only thing the News team is interested in is whether or not you’ll fork over more money. They even supplement it with really bad ads in the interface that parade around as news, like ads from The Penny Saver.
There are bad ads in the Stocks app, and Apple’s at least tested ads in Maps, but Mark Gurman’s rumor about that was from 2022, so I’m not clear if we’ll see it, or someone has been able to hold the line on keeping that out.
Speaking of bad ads, let’s not forget that the App Store needs to skim more money from developers and confound users by inserting ads into that interface as well.
Until third-party app marketplaces are really real, everyone will have to go to search for a specific app and then scroll past the bombastic ad masquerading as the first search result to get to the app they actually want. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone, including the most valuable company in the world.
These are the tactics of companies that sell hardware at a reduced cost, like TV manufacturers, where the hardware is a commodity. Unless Apple starts arguing that they make commodity hardware that needs to be subsidized, I think they should reconsider.
Will it ever be enough?
When I complained about YouTube’s screensaver on social media, I was told to leave a one-star review on the App Store. Like that’s the leverage we have over YouTube. When I wrote about Amazon sticking ads into Prime Video, several people told me that they’d swear off Amazon. (At press time, Amazon is still doing quite well.) It’s worse than vowing you’ll never fly an airline again.
There is little in the way of taste or thoughtfulness to these things that are embedded in Apple’s shipping software. The push for pennies is inculcated into Apple’s business and culture nearly as much as the promoted apps in Microsoft’s Start Menu, Amazon’s junked-up Echo Shows, Roku’s city-for-sale, and YouTube’s screen stealer.
It’s not that advertising is evil, but taking a spot that didn’t have an ad and “innovating” by wedging an ad in there is.
I suspect that the people responsible for plastering Apple TV+ in the interface think they’re better than the people at YouTube injecting a screensaver slideshow. I’m positive everyone thinks they’re better than Amazon.
There must be people at these companies that look at this level of self-serving hackery and realize that they’ve gone too far. But for that to happen, there need to be executives who can see the value in not viewing every inch of interface as an opportunity for more revenue generation.
I’m not optimistic.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]
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