You mean Youtube's infrastructure? Don't worry, Google and Youtube are rolling in enough green dough thanks to those very ads they are serving. They can afford all the infrastructure they need and the engineers to build it.
How? Google made $182 billion in revenue in 2020, of which $41 billion was profit [1] (mostly in ads), and Youtube alone is on track to generate $15 billion of those [2] on an annualized basis (also almost all in ad revenue).
YouTube Vanced[1] for Android is awesome. It supports background playback and allows you to block all ads as well as community posts, surveys, premium movies, and just about anything else. They recently integrated SponsorBlock[2], which allows you to block in-video intros, outros, sponsored sections, and subscription reminders.
However it uses microG, which has long had an open issue with v2 of Google's Cast API. The issue was recently closed however I don't believe it was solved. However it is still possible to work around this. I ended up writing a quick script on my phone that uses pychromecast to initialize the cast so that it can be passed off to YouTube Vanced.
It's been a while since I've cast anything but are you certain that ads are blocked when casting from an app that blocks ads? In my experience with casting, the video is always streamed directly from the content provider's servers (YouTube) to the cast receiver (smart TV) with ads intact. You would need to mirror your phone's display in order to block ads.
They should be named dumb TVs because that what they are.
I dont even own a TV anymore an I have no plan to change that.
I just need the display to watch stuff not freaking android box. More money for high quality monitor that wont be obsolete because it no longer gets system updates.
The word "smart" is so overloaded with definitions as to be nearly useless in such discussions. I like this set of definitions:
- Intelligence is being able to observe systems [1] and understand how they work. Both Hawking and Machiavelli objectively have this.
- Smartness is being able to use one's understanding of a system [1] to achieve one's own goals. Both Hawking and Machiavelli objectively have this.
- Wisdom is being able to choose the right goals. This is where there is a clear distinction between Hawking and Machiavelli, and since it requires moral judgment to deliberate whom of them chooses "the right goals", this cannot have an objective answer.
By the way, it's easy to see with these systems that existing machines that are supposedly "intelligent" and "smart" are in fact neither.
[1] "System" shall be interpreted in the broadest way possible, i.e. "any network of interconnected actors", e.g. a machine or the financial system or any society of people.
