for years I have worked at home, now I am not.And every day when I come home from work I see Mickey sitting on the armchair near the door, looking towards it, waiting for me. I hope he is not sitting there for 8 hours, but anyway I found a Cat TV site, 8 hours. Seemed perfect, but tonight I have it on in the background while going other things, and it gets interruped by ads, and they are loud. Mickey does not like loud TV.
Just mute the tv.
but that defeats the point of the bird chirps. I would think a cat would respond to that more than the video, which does raise the question, what do cats see when looking at a TV. I know they don’t see colors like we do. Can they define the image of a bird on a TV screen, it looks like a real bird, like we do? Or is it just a bunch of color with movement?
I don’t know what they see exactly, but they can see something, or at least some of them can. I had a cat who, when I took her with me to visit my parents when my brother was still in high school, would go nuts when my brother played Super Mario Bros. She would get on top of the TV (when they were that big), lean over, and bat at Mario like she was chasing a large bug.
She never seemed to watch TV in general, although, there was no Cat TV in her lifetime to try out, but she LOVED Mario Bros. If she was anywhere in the house, and heard the theme come on, she’d come charging into the room, and leap to her post on the TV.
I can also tell you that at least some of them do love birdwatching.
The cat I have now can sit in the window and watch birds for a long time. I once had to board her for several weeks while I was taking a class outside the US, and the place I chose had a big enclosure for her, with a window on one side, and a view of the room on the other; the room had a cage with some (domestic) finches in it. Reports were that she loved the birds. She also got a 15 minute pet/play session with an employee in a room with a comfortable couch every day. Great place.
The Cornell Live Feeder cams are great. My cat and I prefer the one in Sapsucker Woods, near campus, but they have many to choose from.
I’ve had cats that watched tv for a few minutes at a time, then lost interest.
When I was a kid, our dog watched tv. Whenever an animal ran off-screen, she’d follow it to see where it went.
Does Mickey pay any attention to birds chirping on the TV when you’re home?
I’ve seen reports that some cats are fascinated; but, whenever an interesting animal noise comes through my computer, whether it’s cat or dog or bird or whatever making the sound, the cats I’ve had will never show interest for any longer than it takes them to figure out that there isn’t actually anybody there.
We owned a cat that never showed any interest in the television. Then, one day into its adult life, we were watching some Attenborough nature show and a pika came on screen and did its whistle-cry. The cat ran into the room and jumped up on the table and was transfixed. Tried to go around the TV to see it from the back or under the TV and we rapidly went from “Haha, the cat thinks it’s real” to “Shit, this cat’s gonna claw the LCD screen to eat the animal”. After that, the cat would sometimes show interest in what’s on the screen or again try to look behind but it was weird how that one moment suddenly changed the cat’s outlook regarding the television.
Also, that pika was on a 46" screen and was twice the size of the cat. He would have gotten his ass kicked if he managed to magically breach the screen barrier.
There was an attempt at a puppy TV channel some years back, it was before its time, as it would have actually been a cable channel rather than a youtube or other streaming. It wasn’t for puppies, but instead would feature puppies, playing, sleeping, eating and stuff like that.
They wanted to go without ads, and do product placement instead, where the puppies would be eating sponsored foods, playing with sponsored toys, and sleeping on sponsored beds.
I don’t know if something like that would work for cats, as they are more fickle consumers.
YouTube. Here’s an 8 hour bird video, no ads:
A looooong time ago. 
Our old cat was fascinated whenever there were monkeys on the television, and would sometimes look behind the TV to try to find them. We hypothesized that he wanted to eat them (just like the cat Bucky in the comic strip Get Fuzzy).
On the other hand, whenever there was a wolf howl on the TV, that cat would get very panicky, and sometimes run away into another room.
The current cats have largely ignored the TV, though I do have a photo of Pippin, as a kitten, staring up at the opening crawl to The Empire Strikes Back. 
Just out of curiosity - who uses TV to advertise what to cats?
You could run the audio output through an audio compressor. That should even out the loud and soft parts. You can do this either with dedicated hardware or software.
I thought YouTube put ads on all videos now. So you’d need to have some sort of adblock to keep them away.
Also YouTube has a thing where they often check every few hours to see if you’re still there, to thwart the sleep sound apps that were racking up the watch time. It got in the way of the soothing music I would play for Mom.
There’s a pay version of YouTube, isn’t there? without ads? I don’t watch a great variety of videos-- mostly things for my classes, hard-to-find old films, occasional sleep videos. On the last, I’m pretty sure they aren’t interrupted with ads, because I doubt I’d sleep through them-- albeit, I’m a pretty serious insomniac, and I don’t usually sleep more than three or four hours at a time. It could be I’m just not making it to the ads.
But I’d think YouTube would have a lot of angry customers if people couldn’t use the sleep videos. I seriously doubt that people who play the sleep videos never watch anything else; people who essentially lost access to their sleep videos might be mad enough to stop watching. It’s not like YouTube is hurting for revenue that it can’t break even on the sleep videos by just playing ads at the beginning-- I have noticed that the leader ads to sleep videos are pretty long, and can’t be clicked through like most ads can.
I don’t know what’s up with music you are playing for your mother, BigT–is it specifically a sleep video, or on a sleep channel, or it is just a video of “soothing music,” not specifically tagged as “for sleep”?
When I have watched full movies, even movies in public domain, those are either interrupted by ads, or in segments, each one preceded by a set of ads, and they come at least every 15 or 20 minutes-- they are placed pretty randomly, though, not at “cliffhanger” moments designed to keep me waiting, like the ones on TV. I’ve wondered if there are so many spots a movie is supposed to have, and a program just divides the length of the film in minutes by the number of ad spots, and then places the ads that way.
BigT– out of curiosity, on the “soothing music” videos, when does the first one play? is it several hours in? as though YouTube gives you a few hours, then starts running ads every 20 minutes? Or do they come with some other frequency?
You misunderstood part of my post, which may be my fault.
Ads aren’t the problem for YouTube for me. I was just responding to the fact that the OP says “Cat Tv without ads,” and someone recommended a service that runs ads. So I presumed his device does not have adblock. (I had forgotten you could pay for YouTube, honestly, and am not sure that works with all devices.)
I have used adblockers for YouTube for a very long time now, basically since it became practical to support the creators in other ways. Google continues to employ practices that seem to ignore the needs of most of their creators, so I don’t want to support that. Plus, yes, it avoids annoyances. (I also think most ads are immoral, trying to manufacture desire for their products rather than just tell you they exist.)
So ads were not the issue. The issue was that YouTube would check in every so often, asking you were still there. From what I understand, this was due to preventing low-effort sleep noise videos from gaming the system. The system rewards long watch times and longer videos. So having a video that played during sleep would get them a bunch of “points” very quickly. So they implemented something that would pause the video about 3 hours in and ask if you were still there. Presumably the idea was that most people would be asleep by then and wouldn’t notice.
Now it wasn’t entirely consistent. I know the one where it did it the most is when you would choose to just keep playing similar videos. But it also happened a few times when I would repeat the same song on a play list, or even when I played an 8+ hour video that was soothing music. But other times it didn’t ask.
I actually left feedback similar to what you said here: that it would just inconvenience users. And that they should instead change their algorithm to detect these uses and weigh them more appropriately. But, as of Mom’s death, they had not taken this to heart.
I had a Cavalier KC spaniel that mostly ignored TV but hated primates on the tube. One time she saw an ad featuring an orangutan wearing a Walkman, and went into a volley of furious barking.
Sounds like you need to rewatch Scrooged this holiday season.
I think that youtube video upthread might be what they play at my vets’ office in the cat waiting area. There are gerbils digging in sand too, though.