Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.
Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that’s certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin’s filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension’s dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google’s efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.
When I stream YouTube to my TV, I get 15-30 seconds of unskippable ads with the ability to skip enabling at the 15 or 30 second mark. The full length of the ad is 90+ seconds (according to the timer that never goes down). Would this implementation work similarly? 6 seconds of a silent black screen is fine; 90 or more seconds because the skip button is also missing would be more annoying (or be a nice time for a bathroom break).
I recently had to watch YouTube with ads on my tv, because smartube stopped working and needed to wait a day for a new patch.The ads are insane and i stopped watching anything on yt. I can’t imagine anyone consuming content this way.
If your tv is using an Android-based OS: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube