Avoiding pre-roll and mid-roll ads in many streaming video services on iPhone

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One of the annoyances of modern life is that adverts have crept into video streaming services - yes, you can pay more to get an 'ad free' tier, but if you do that for everything you watch then life gets quite expensive.

Happily, I have found that many video streaming services support picture in picture (don't worry, I'll explain) and therefore, when an advert does hit, either before or in the middle of a programme, you can swipe the video to a screen corner and at least do something else productive during the enforced 30 second or 90 second ad. For example, answering an email or text or browsing your favourite social network. Then, when the advert ends, a single tap restores full screen playback of your programme.

To illustrate this, I'll use Disney+, though this also works for BBC iPlayer, Prime Video, YouTube, and, I'm sure, several others - you'll have to experiment!

So I'm watching a programme full-screen:


And the ad starts, so I swipe up to go home, at which point the phone reverts to portrait UI and the ad shrinks to the top right (though in fact, you can drag this player window to any corner if it gets in the way):



And then you can interact with your phone in the usual way, whiling away the necessary 90 seconds (or however long) doing something more productive than watching the wretched advert.

The only caveat is that the advert's sound can't usually be tapped away so easily, so you might have or want to turn the volume down with your phone's buttons. And then turn up again when the programme restarts.

I appreciate this is a little bit of a kludge to avoid being too bothered by adverts and I wouldn't bother for a 30s ad spot, but some streaming services have been known to put in a 3 minute ad here and there, and I'm just not prepared to put up with that!

Hope this helps someone anyway.

PS. If you like my work then think about buying me a beer at paypal.me/stevelitchfield - thanks!

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