If you’re like me your television viewing habits have coalesced around YouTube. Terrestrial TV for all intensive purposes is dead has nothing appealing to a Gen xer and is either low effort sitcoms or reality shows. Streaming is where the real content is now. HBO is always top shelf Netflix up there too Apple definitely sometimes even though that’s just a repackage of terrestrial TV. But where I found myself gravitating towards most of the time is you two. And over the last year I have seen YouTube go from 80% content 20% ads to almost 50% content 50% ads. Just this past month I’ve noticed that I’m watching more ads than I am content. And what really gets me is where you used to be able to skip the ads after 5 seconds now most of the ads that I’m seeing are unskippable. How many times do I need to see a GoDaddy arrow or site ground or WordPress or WP engine or hostinger ad? How many times do I have to click do not show me this ad or block ad to a to really go away?
What’s even better is the irrelevant ads that I’m getting. I am not sure why I have to see Tampax or other feminine hygiene ads. I’m a guy. I’m not sure why I have to see ads about medication to treat my Crohn’s disease or my psoriasis. Does the YouTube add algorithm know something that my doctor and I don’t? I’m perfectly happy chowing down on a large piece of light bread.
So since my viewing habits aren’t changing but YouTube seems to want to push more and more ads and less and less content I sat down with Claude AI and in the matter of about an hour built a system that will log in to YouTube grab all the videos from channels that I’ve subscribed to and allow me to download them directly onto my computer. The setup was a little convoluted in that I had to set up an OAuth key and an API key for YouTube data… Also had to set up a cloudflare URL that points to a tail scale IP address of a computer on my personal VPN. Isn’t something for the light-hearted. This is a home server intermediate to hard level project. Anyhow clock code wrote a nice python back end that will log in download all new videos data… Not the video itself and then display a thumbnail the title and who the content creator is. From there it gave me options to download the MP4 video onto my local Naz drive which I then can use as the source in VLC. The thing about downloading the MP4 directly from YouTube is that you don’t get the commercials. You don’t get two minutes of mid-roll commercials about a bear and toilet paper. You don’t get Crohn’s disease commercials.
The last straw with YouTube and the advertising was when I noticed that if I click on a video after watching a video I have to sit through 20 seconds of commercials no skip. And if I hit back the video that I wanted to watch is gone. So the algorithm is seeing intent and then pushing and unskippable commercial block on the user. I work in advertising for my day job and I know this algorithm well. It’s the premium model where sure you can click and watch but you have to watch 50% ads before you can do anything.
The system that Claude built for me at my direction I am calling my tube.
