I'm subscribed to something like 60 YouTube channels. Podcasts, tech talks, tutorials. You subscribe after one great video and then never watch most of what they upload. Podcasts are the worst: 2-3 hour episodes that pile up and never get watched. My Watch Later hit 400+ videos at one point. I tried pasting transcripts into ChatGPT, but you get a wall of text with no structure, and you have to do it by hand for every video. The by-hand part is what killed it. The problem was never one video, it was the steady stream. So I built Minerva, and the part I use most is the newsletter. You pick some of the channels you follow and a schedule (weekly for me), and it watches them, summarizes whatever they upload, and emails you an edition. Not a list of links: a short intro tying the batch together, a blurb per video, and a link to each full summary with a TL;DR, key points, clickable timestamps into the video, quotes and action items. If I don't feel like reading, every summary can be played as audio, and I queue a few and listen on a walk. It also works on demand. Connect YouTube (read-only, it can't post or change anything), get a feed of recent uploads from your channels, and summarize one or a batch whenever you want. Where it earns its keep is long stuff. A 3-hour podcast turns into a few minutes of reading, and I actually keep up with podcasts now. What's free: 3 new videos a month, up to an hour each, within 240 free minutes. Your very first one can be up to 3 hours. Anything already summarized in Minerva (like the videos in the library) is free at any length. No card. The scheduled newsletter is on paid plans, and the first 100 people to upgrade get 30% off for their first 3 months. Some things I learned building it, if you're working on something similar: Most of the hard engineering went into getting the audio at all (YouTube bot detection, proxies, retries), not into the AI part. Summary quality was never what made me keep using it. Getting it on a schedule did. A tool you have to remember to open loses to your own habits. A generous free tier needs hard limits first. I check video length before downloading anything and there's a daily budget with a kill switch, so a busy day can't run up a bill. Here's a 48-second walkthrough of a real newsletter edition: https://minerva.ink/marketing/minerva-demo-2026-10.mp4 You can see real output without signing up: https://minerva.ink/popular?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=launch-2026-10 Or try it: https://minerva.ink/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=launch-2026-10 Honest feedback welcome. What would make something like this worth keeping for you?   submitted by   /u/AdFit3989 [link]   [comments]