Bypassing Ads on Free to Air Streaming Services

Or… How to not see any advertisements on the streaming services provided by free to air television channels — if they are using brightcove or Google media player.

Photo by Deon Fosu on Unsplash

TL;DR¹

How the ‘magic’ happens (of course, YMMV — your mileage may vary)

1. Install Ghostery (https://www.ghostery.com/)
2. Navigate to your favourite free to air streaming service (and login if required)
3. Open the Ghostery Preferences and set to ‘Trust for this site’ for the following trackers (not all of them will be present and will depend on which site you go to):
— Brightcove Player
— Brightcove
— Google IMA

Leave all of the other trackers blocked.

Eh voila! — watch your tv show or movies without ads (this worked on all but one of the sites that I tried)

Keeping Things Anonymous

I do not necessarily have a dislike for companies tracking what I do on websites, collecting data, or seeing how I interact with a site.

I do however have a rather large dislikes for the tracking technologies behind what is happening. As a web developer, I have integrated and used multiple tracking services — they fall into two different camps

1. Understanding how the site works and debugging…