For months now, my son has been receiving advertisements on YouTube Kids while watching his favorite channels on our Chromecast with Google TV in the living room. Whether we’re casting or not, on his profile or mine via the Kids app, the result is the same. Intermittently, an ad or two will show and then disappear, leaving us with the ad-free experience we pay for with our YouTube Premium subscription.
I’ve reached out to support, offered them video clips and screenshots of our experience, and was simply told to reboot the Chromecast. After doing so and reporting back, we went through a few more troubleshooting steps like uninstalling and reinstalling the YouTube Kids app, but to no avail. Mere days or weeks later, the problem persists, and today, my son has been inundated with ads for movies nonstop.
At first, I thought there was just a fluke with our subscription or that it was something I was doing wrong on my end, and perhaps that could still be true – if a card lapses and the payment fails, perhaps the TV simply doesn’t know how to pick back up on the reconnection, but I still feel as though Google’s hyper-intelligent software should at least be able to solve problems like this, especially because it’s dedicated so much time and attention to families and family experiences in recent times.
I’m not alone either, and Google Support is full of others who have had the same experience, only to be told by community managers to reboot their dongle and to follow the same troubleshooting steps I’ve mentioned above. In each instance, the original poster does not reply back after a few attempts to solve the problem, and I don’t blame them as I feel this problem is definitely on Google’s end.
Here’s what I want to do – I want to accumulate as many comments as possible on this down below of those of you who are also experiencing this. To be sure, follow the aforementioned steps to solve the problem, but if you continue to get ads on YouTube Kids profiles on your Chromecast with Google TV, please sound off. Clear your app cache, sign in and out of the app, and even reboot your device before determining this.
I’m personally pretty fed up with paying for YouTube Premium when people can continue to advertise to my son and when I don’t even get an ad-free experience on YouTube TV. I understand that content providers still can’t work out deals with Google to remove pre-recorded ads, and so on, but when it comes to my son, there’s simply no excuse for not putting more weight and effort into the removal of ads when I’m paying top dollars over the years to a company with advanced machine learning and AI technology.
I’m not canceling my subscription as I still benefit from it across the board for learning and listening to music, but this has got to be resolved soon. I’ve already canceled my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions, so my Chromecast with Google TV is practically just a YouTube machine now. Add to that the fact that the home screen is chock-full of content from apps and services that I don’t – and won’t subscribe to, and this ad-ridden dongle is just becoming more of a headache than anything (Oh, and we still don’t have separate user profiles). If that part of the experience isn’t even working well enough, then I may take it out of my living room and go back to my old Chromecast and simply use the cast feature from my phone to tailor the experience to my lifestyle.
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