Does everything need to be an ad?

Joe Rosensteel writing for Six Colors

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.

…

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.)

This is completely unacceptable, Google needs to revert this change.

Oh, and the icing on the cake:

Even if you have the ad-free YouTube Premium, like I do, you’ll see the screen stealer.

I guess that’s because it’s not showing ads yet, but once it does, wil this change? I doubt it.