As someone who aggressively adblocks everything, one of the final places that ads can still reach me is in annoying ad reads within podcasts. Youtube sponsorblock is incredible but it seems no one has yet adapted this for podcasts. Has anyone else managed to find a solution here? As far as i can tell in my googleing, this doesn’t yet exist. Anyone else extremely interested in something that skips/removes sponsor segments from podcasts?
I’ve noticed a major increase in ads injected into podcasts. In particular, I listen to 6 podcasts from Marketplace APM (Marketplace Tech, Morning Report (UK, US, Midmorning), Marketplace, and Make Me Smart). Warning, mini-rant incoming…
They started with preroll and post roll spots which were just self-promotion for their other shows. This was annoying on it’s own because I’d hear the same ads like 12 times a day. But this year those spots were converted into location-based targeted ads, they are totally not the same volume or tonal style totally breaking my concentration. And there are spots in the middle of the episodes too. So now I would be “forced” to listen to the same ads like 30 times a day. Unbearable.
As to solutions:
There’s an existing feature request for the top Open Source android podcast app AntennaPod.
I’ve been planning out my own hypothetical approach. The idea would be to use multiple strategies (similar to what @bet@lemm.ee, @133arc585 and @pallettownbry recommended in this thread) but actually implemented in a gPodder compatible self-hosted podcast server. This would allow one to offload the resource intensive work (audio analysis, audio transcription, LLM) to a more capable server (hypothetically) while being compatible with nearly any podcast app.
P.S. I actually pay for premium services for ad-free content where available: CBB World, Crooked Media Friends of the Pod, and Stitcher Premium (RIP).
As someone who setup his own nas over the pandemic I really like this approach. Needed a time intensive project to stay sane and I keep finding more useful things it can do.
Another thought I’ve had, plex has a skip intro feature. This works by scanning the audio from multiple episodes and showing the skip button when available. Maybe something like that could build up an ad library of the most obnoxious repetitive podcast ads and work across different podcasts. It wouldn’t work for unique self reads though.
I wish I had the technical knowledge to build something like this but I done even know where to begin.
Yeah, AntennaPod already has an auto skip config that I use to skip the first or last N seconds. Which I’ve configured. But it’s not technically always 30 seconds or 120 seconds. And that doesn’t help with mid episode ads.