If that is successful, I would expect youtube to switch to simply checking if the ads were actually served to the user. That wouldn’t require checking for adblock on the users computer. Of course the adblocker would just download the content and not display it if they did that.
Either that or merging the ad into the video stream itself. This would make it un-skippable, but would also be unblockable without stream processing (there are commercial skip options for ffmpeg and similar encoders, so not completely impossible, but much more work and more likely to mark real content as a commercial as well).
Probs a sponsor block like thing could work
Thankfully it seems that encoding ads into the video stream is still too expensive for them to implement.
I’m assuming that asking CDNs to combine individualized ads with content and push the unique streams to hosts does not scale well.
I don’t think that inlining ads into the stream would be expensive, because of how adaptive streaming formats work. There are probably other reasons why they haven’t chosen this option yet.
This seems simple for one stream, but scale that up to how many unique streams that Youtube is servicing at any given second. 10k?
Google doesn’t own all of the hardware involved in this video serving process. They push videos to their local CDNs, which then push the videos to the end users. If we’re configuring streams on the fly with advertisements, we need to push the ads to the CDNs pushing out the content. They may already be collocated, but they may not. We need to factor in additional processing which costs time and money.
I can see this becoming an extremely ugly problem when you’re working with a decentralized service model like Youtube. Nothing is ever easy since they don’t own everything.
So what you would do is to generate the manifest files (HLS/DASH/what have you) on the fly to include the segments with ads. Since adaptive streaming is based on manifests, that stitch together segments of video files that together make up the underlying content in different bitrates, you can essentially just push in a few segments of advertising in-between the segments representing the underlying content. This isn’t particularly hard to do, and you’d get the full benefit of the CDN for the segments, so there’s really no issue.
or merging the ad into the video stream itself. This would make it un-skippable
That’s not true. Besides the point that people can skip any video content manually anyway, I already use a Firefox addon called “SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip sponsorships”, which is configurable and works for other sites as well. The skip points are community maintained, but with the help of AI it should be easy to detect ads automatically. The point is, there are already tools to help with skipping video encoded content.
There’s nothing to skip if they overlay small ads while the content is playing.
On the bright side such small ads may be less annoying than full screen ads.
Sponsor block demonstrates one approach to this. If everybody has the ad at the same time stamps, sponsor block would just work out of the box.
If they got creative and introduced different time stamps for the advertisements for different people, then we could do something like MD5 hash of different video payloads, and look for the MD5 hash that isn’t distributed to everybody, mark that as an advertisement
Theoretically they could deny serving byte ranges before the end-of-ad mark until those bytes have been served and a plausible time (the duration of the ad) has passed. Practically this is likely more expensive than what the ad revenue would yield.
This would probably be unviable, since from a UX standpoint you want the first segments of the non-ad content to be preloaded when the ad ends.
That will be irrelevant when the control freaks take over. Case in point: anti piracy ads in the good old DVD/BluRay days. Unskippable shit that ironically only punishes people who bought legitimate media.
I honestly think that the people at Google are a bit smarter than that, but we’ll see whether that holds or not.
As much as I hate ads and hate the concept that I would be forced to view them, these kind of legal wranglings freak me out. It seems quite possible that a ruling in my favor here would be used against me somewhere else. Courts and lawmakers don’t understand technology and don’t realize the effects laws have. And frankly, the rest of us don’t have much idea, either.
I’m not sure how this one could be problematic; you just decline to consent to your browser being identified when you click into the site, or not decline if you want that feature for whatever service needs it.
It’s not saying it’s illegal to collect at all, it’s just illegal to collect without consent.
At this point I’m just holding for dear life to piped.video, because illegal front-ends are my only hope to keep watching YouTube.
The first thing that we all need to change is letting rich corporations decide what’s legal and what’s illegal. If using an alternative frontend can be considered illegal, then these corporations are guilty of crimes that would get them guillotined.
