App version: 2.0.0 (Play Store)
Feature you want: Ability to skip ads and sponsors in the podcast
Suggested solution: Users submit when a sponsor or ad happens in an episode, and it automatically skips sponsors it knows about. Supports skipping other categories, such as intros, outros and reminders to subscribe.
Screenshots / Drawings / Technical details: This is something already exists for Youtube videos maybe can be integrated in podcasts too.
Hi @Draconian
Welcome to the AntennaPod community forum! (And sorry nobody replied until now)
I personally donāt have any podcasts with ads that Iād want to skip, but I get this feature might be interesting. Youāre not the only one to bring up SponsorBlock - itās been mentioned also in this GitHub issue (where AntennaPodās app development happens).
Itās an interesting concept & process, but I guess quite complex to integrate, both on a technical level as well as in the UI, so I wouldnāt get my hopes up this gets implemented quickly.
I guess we should discuss here just that: how it could integrate in a nice way in the UI. Would you have any ideas for that?
I only have two podcasts that I listen to that contain ads. On both of them, the ads are almost always the same length and the ad is always prefaced by a bell or a chime. I just have my fast forward button set to skip ahead 15 seconds, which is usually enough to skip the ad. The only time I donāt do it this way is when I am driving, because my partner feels it is unsafe and Iād have to agree.
For reference, they spoke about it on Podcasting 2.0: Episode 8: Chapter 8 http://adam.curry.com/html/PC200820201023Podcas-mRC5pZ8HF6nPtDV1rXdFVk2mLL476n.html [00:34:03]
When I am driving I uncheck the Forward Button Skip, and Android auto would do fast forward when you press the skip button, works even on bluetooth
I think you could make it work with one extra button in the player controls.
Press the button to āStart Segmentā at the current time and press again to record the end of the segment. Then open a little pop-up with a menu for selecting the type of segment and a check mark to submit the data.
Sponsorblock allows you to use the service passively, without contributing yourself, and it still works very well. So I think people should have the option to hide the button and still have the feature turned on.
The progress bar should indicate the skipped segments with a different color like the add-on does.
I honestly think this would be the ultimate killer feature and would make AntennaPod very popular very quickly.
Thanks @FeederPilot for chipping in! A few thoughts.
Nice idea. Do you know of other apps that implement this? Any idea for a kind of icon? Where in the interface do you think it could be placed (taking into consideration that the interface is currently nice & clean, and that we want to keep it that way)?
I see your point. But a) this would introduce yet another setting (in addition to the settings required for the integration) b) I would make an argument for making such functionality always available: if you want to benefit from it, you should (be able to easily) contribute to it. An option to hide this encourages leeching.
Good idea.
Thatās what I thought of ChromeCast support when it got introduced. I lost faith in single possible killer features ever since 
Different users, different needsā¦
Nice idea. Do you know of other apps that implement this?
No. this would be the only one, I think.
Any idea for a kind of icon?
That depends if you would go with the minimal approach and only do one type of segment (ads). Then Iād use a shield, like many AdBlockers do. For more segment types a shield could still work but maybe something different would be good. Canāt think of anything though.
Where in the interface do you think it could be placed
Left next to the playback speed button is still room. I think Iād try to scale both of those buttons down a bit. They donāt need to be as big as the Skip Buttons.
Or you could introduce a second row between the progress bar and the player controls with small icons where Speed, Sponsorblock and Sleep timer could live. Not as clean anymore but clean enough (to me) and very useful for quick access.
An option to hide this encourages leeching.
True, but leechers gonna leech anyway. Nothing thatās that important to me though.
Thatās what I thought of ChromeCast support when it got introduced. I lost faith in single possible killer features ever since
I couldāve told you! I think the amount of people that cast their podcasts to their speakers is probably not that big. But one thing everybody can agree on is that ads suck. So I really think this would be pretty huge.
Have you looked at the Sponsorblock repository? Wouldnāt it be possible to take the core functionality and port it to AntennaPod? Just to make things a little easier, I mean. Maybe the author would be open to a cooperation in some form. Could be awesome.
Hi there,
Long time, first time, etc. Just my 2c as a pretty heavy podcast listener - I know we donāt want to make ethical/moral choices on behalf of users, which is fine, but I think we can try to nudge them in the direction of supporting content creators.
Personally, Iād only use such a feature where I donāt have the option to pay for ad-free content (e.g. Stuff You Should Know), as a convenience instead of fast forwarding. Where I can, I pay.
Can we find/create a service (actually, Iāve been looking for a side-project) where sponsorship/donation/contribution options for a podcast are listed? With something like that, AntennaPod could then look up a particular podcast by feed URL, and display a donate/support button as appropriate when this type of feature is activated. Sure, many people would just ignore this and skip ads anyway, but itās the thought that counts, right?
Iām tempted to suggest that this be an image like this 
:
I donāt want to guilt users, but I really really donāt want podcast creators to all move to something like spotify or stitcher.
Hereās a video showing how Vanced (android app) made SponsorBlock submissions work on mobile:
And here is a video that shows the submission workflow in the browser extension if you have not seen:
I completely agree, itās my same fear. I donāt like walled gardens. One pod I really enjoy did that last winter and I, sadly, no longer listen.
Ask ourselves these three simple questions:
I wouldnāt jump to that conclusion too easily. I, for one, donāt think ads suck. Theyāre not awesome, but they pay the creators or my fun-time. Anyway - whether ads suck or not is not the point of this thread, so Iāll stop there
I havenāt - but Iām not a developer so wouldnāt be of any help implementing this either way
There is stuff going on over at the Podcast Index. Thereās two relevant requests to integrate it in AntennaPod:
Thanks for sharing that @ajayyy ! Very helpful to see how this could work. It does feel like AntennaPod would need a dedicated row for SponsorBlock in the player screen.
The frame selection in video is very helpful in finding the start and end, but Iām wondering how this could be replicated with audio only. Showing a still obviously is not going to work. Either:
Different point; I know from previous issues in AntennaPod that storing the playback location of audio-files with variable bitrate can sometimes be problematic. Could this prove an issue for SponsorBlock support?
Interesting, yea that could be a pretty major issue. I know we recently noticed that a music video on YouTube suddenly had broken segments, and it seems to have been caused by it being āremasteredā into HD, and probably reencoding.
Donāt some podcast networks use dynamic ad slots as well? So simply matching timestamps with a given RSS entry wouldnāt work 100% I believe, there may need to be some fingerprinting involved to uniquely identify the episode. Unlike SB where YouTube gives us a unique ID for each video.
Better yet, fingerprint the ad?
Sounds like implementing this got a whole lot more challenging than I thought when the feature request was created on GitHub. However, fingerprinting would be something thatād be newly implemented in SponsorBlock, and sounds rather complex. I suspect that dynamic advertising is still relatively small, so Iād first focus on getting timestamps implemented.
@ajayyy Is there a list somewhere of segment categories that you support?
Sorry, I missed this message.
There is a list in here: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/blob/master/config.json.example
Sponsor, Intro, Outro, Interaction Reminder, Self/Unpaid promotion (Promotion that is not a sponsor)
The āmusic_offtopicā category is non music sections in music videos, which is not applicable to podcasts.
How dynamic it is would require an implementation and testing it in the field.
So far I had the feeling that position and length of sponsor segments are rather static in my favourites.
A skip 30 seconds sometimes even nails it perfectly.
In some podcasts even chapter marks are provided that mark ads with just a small 2 second margin of error.
I think we should help with earnings first
Podcastindex.org mention new name spaces that lead users to the places where you can send money with funding and value names paces.
Antenna Pod isnāt using some of the newer features.
That is where I think improvements are needed first
@ghast Agreed monetary support ideally comes first. See our GitHub for the specifics of the value tag: Support for <podcast:value> tag; AntennaPod being a wallet, paying podcasters Ā· Issue #4671 Ā· AntennaPod/AntennaPod Ā· GitHub
Because itās all so new, and even the developers working on value implementation in other apps/platforms seem to struggle a lot, I reckon it will be a while before that gets implemented in AntennaPod, though (let alone the expertise it requires - would probably need an expert on the topic to prepare a PR).
Hey all.
I watched this discussion play out on the NewPipe community. I respect that you are trying to do the right thing. Unfortunately Iām burnt out by the very low quality of discussion that happened over at newpipe.
I just wanted to encourage any developer hesitating to do the work until after you get the green light: Donāt wait, just do it. Plenty of us will be switching over to your fork. So it went with NewPipe.
Then if antennapod proper does decide in favor of merging, awesome! The topic can be put to rest more quickly with the work already done.
Keep up the good work all.
I donāt think anybody is going rogue and forking AntennaPod to put Sponsorblock in it.
But Iād like to see this feature a lot.
My main arguments are:
It doesnāt hurt anybody. It really, really doesnāt. - Nobody has data about which parts of the podcasts I listen to or skip. They donāt even know if I actually listen or if I just downloaded the file. They donāt know which podcast player I use. There is no harm done here. Just driving this point home.
Iām skipping the ads anyway. Sponsorblock would just make it more convenient. No advertiser has a right to my attention.
Iād rather you guys put work into this, a proven feature that people want, rather than a fancy new tech that may or may not be the way to support podcasts in the future. If history is any indication this project is more likely to fail than to succeed. Which is a shame but thatās the way I think this will play out.
And itās not like there arenāt already many different well established ways to support your favorite creators. Be it Patreon or direct donations. So I donāt really see a good reason to wait implementing Sponsorblock. There are no real downsides to this.