Automatic Ad Skipping
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I have a feature request that might be tricky, but I wanted to suggest it. What if Pocket Casts could have an AI feature that automatically skips over ads in podcasts? Many listeners, including myself, often skip multiple ads per episode, so a feature that detects and skips these ads would make the experience smoother. I’m not sure if you would be legally allowed to do something like that, but I think a lot of users would appreciate not having to manually skip through ads. I hope you can consider this idea, even if it’s a challenging one to implement.
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skipping should be legally possible but the question is „how“ – ads comes in various ways.
Some podcasts offer a premium (payed) option with more content and non ads. For example I pay yearly for the premium subscription for „Bitsundso“ a tech podcast.
Overall ads in podcasts are not bad. People need to earn money and doing it this way is fine for me.
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Hi @chalkandcarrots,
To expand on @bkrnk’s point, the implementation would indeed be tricky since ads can be inserted in different ways by podcast authors.
Any ads you hear would be from the podcast author adding them to their podcast. These are the two common methods authors use to insert ads into their episodes:
- Recording the ad with the rest of the podcast – to listeners’ ears, this sounds the most natural, as there are well-defined transitions for when an ad starts and ends.
- “Dynamic Ad Insertion” (DAI) – if you hear ads that sound very local and rather out of place compared to the rest of the episode, it is often a sign that DAI is being used. This is because DAI serves ads based on your phone’s IP address. However, it’s important to note that Pocket Casts does not provide your location for these ads. It’s actually the podcast hosting providers who figure out your location based on where your phone requests downloads from.
As you can imagine, dynamic ad insertion is particularly difficult to handle.
That said, we have received a similar request to provide ‘smart’ ad skipping feature. I’ll go ahead and add to that feature request and forward your feedback to our team.
Thank you for your suggestion!
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@chalkandcarrots I have a few suggestions that might help you for now. One is you can set it to automatically skip the beginning and/or end of episodes in the individual podcast settings to deal with beginning and end ads. If you are binging podcasts that dynamically insert ads so they might vary from episode to episode, what I do is I download as many of the episodes as I can at once so the ads vary less between episodes, thus making the auto-skipping more effective. You can also customize the time for the fast forward (and rewind) buttons to make manual skipping faster. The default skip back 10 seconds and skip ahead 45 is actually quite helpful for me.
I hope this helps.
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I would like to +1000 for this feature. I despise ads, and particularly annoying are the DAI type which identify my country, so I get a transition to the local accent, followed by and insistence that I must be suffering from really bad personal odour issues and I should check out their product. Typically, as soon as that happens, I unsubscribe from the podcast. I pay for ad-free wherever possible, but some providers are unwilling to provide private-feeds for ad-free listening.
It would also be nice to have a control so I could mark the start/end of a bit of audio I never want to hear again — there are some annoying non-ads, for example, slate.com’s always telling me on my private, non-add feed, that I should sign up for slate-plus to avoid ads. I guess any ad-filtering would soak up a lot of battery, which might make it un-popular.
One solution might be to use bittorrent type protocols to segment audio into “fair-use” segments, remove the ads, and then have a player based on re-constructing the ad-free segments.
Or source two simultaneous streams using different GEO-IP VPNs and only play the bits which match. For downloaded content, that might work. Could also use this technique to construct a skip-list to detect where the DAI insertion points are in the stream and publish that to everyone. No copyright issues there. But then they would use random DAI insertion, but then, by sampling multiple streams over different GEO-IP we could provide a per-block checksum, but then they would put in non-audible differences in each block to defeat that, but then we could do more signal processing. The work “we” would have to do would be like:
- all subscribers to podcast A would download the current item
- all would calculate a block-level checksum list and upload to a central repo
- as new unique checksum lists are posted to the central repo, they are examined to create the list of common blocks — the uncommon blocks being inserted ads
- updated block checksum lists are made available — it might take a few uploads to the repo before a good block-play list is created — it should get better and better
- when a play request is made, only audio blocks which match are played
Checksum calculation should not increase battery use much. Not sure about current cpu architectures, but there are bound to be nice instructions to create checksums.
I am assuming that each block played is part of a chunk read on from “disk” to memory and then DMAd out to the audio, and will get pulled thru the cache, so the incremental cost to checksum will be slight.
There are bound to be better ways to do this….
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As I remember. You can listen to podcast eg. via Amazon Prime without ads.
I understand what you want. But nothing is for free. ;-)
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@pandorra1975 just to clarify, Pocket Casts does not insert ads into podcasts at all. Any ads that you hear within podcast episodes are added by the podcast creator. Sometimes ads can be included in episodes when listening in Pocket Casts where you hear a different ad or no ad at all when listening on another platform. That’s typically an indication that the podcast creator is using Dynamic Ad Insertion, which inserts advertisements into the episode file at the time of download. That’s something that’s fully controlled by the podcast creator, their hosting company, and/or any ad network that they’re choosing to work with.
Some podcasts will offer a paid, members-only feed, which will give you access to their podcast episodes without any ads, however that is on case-by-case basis and is also something setup and controlled by the podcast creators.
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I wonder if someone somewhere decides to make a Sponsorblock but for podcasts instead of Youtube!
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+1; this discussion may be of interest as well https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/4159
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@rustyshacklefordtaken thank you for sharing your thoughts and pointing us to that GitHub discussion as well!
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If a show always begins with 30/60/90/120 seconds of ads, I use auto-skip to avoid them. And I set my seek forward to jump ahead 30 seconds, a common ad length. I jump back 10 seconds if I go a bit too far. That’s about the best you can do.
If auto-skipping ads became a widely used feature, a lot of your favorite shows would disappear. Ads keep them going. You have to put up with them, unless you’re willing to pay $5-10 a month for Patreon versions of every show you like.
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Thank you @mikerockwell. I know that it is not the app inserting adds in the episodes.
And there are many different ways ads are placed.
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I’ve been following this discussion with interest because I actually tackled this exact problem recently.
@staff-bluejay is right about the technical challenges – DAI makes this particularly tricky since the ads change based on location and time of download. And @bugsmeany makes a valid point about creators needing revenue.
I ended up building an external solution that processes the podcast RSS feeds before they hit Pocket Casts. It uses AI transcription to identify ad segments regardless of whether they’re baked-in host reads or dynamically inserted, then creates clean feeds you can add to any podcast app.
The approach is similar to what @strummerj912 mentioned about SponsorBlock – crowdsourced in a way since once an episode is processed, it’s cached for all users. But I also built in creator compensation to address the ethical concerns several of you raised.
For those interested, it’s at https://zeroads.ai – works great with Pocket Casts since you just add the cleaned RSS feeds like any other podcast. About $6/month which is way cheaper than multiple Patreon subscriptions.
But honestly, I’d love to see Pocket Casts implement something native (so I don’t have to maintain the thing). The auto-skip settings @kapods22 mentioned are helpful, but having to manually figure out skip times for each podcast is tedious. Maybe Pocket Casts could partner with a service that maintains a crowd-sourced database of ad timestamps?
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@fxuniverse89c05931ad Thanks for sharing the solution you’ve built!
We know that a lot of our users have strong opinions about ads in episodes. That said, so far, our stance in Pocket Casts is to respect the choices made by podcast creators to support themselves, including their choice to include ads in their episodes. We will keep the community updated, however, if our stance changes.
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