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Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current
by chii 3y ago
Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms.
They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later.
Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.
- londons_explore 3y agosplicing video is pretty easy - there are certain points - key frames - where video streams can be spliced with nearly zero computational overhead, no loss of quality, no loading delay, etc.
- zh3 3y agoIndeed, we've done exactly this with production quality adverts where we'd add real-time information (e.g. betting odds) into the ad at selected points.s
- chii 3y agoi dont think what's stopping google is a technical difficulty problem, but a scale problem (as well as a lack of real need atm). I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos). It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the edge.
- londons_explore 3y agoAdblocking is very much on googles radar. But they realise it is a cat and mouse game - and whenever you start playing that game, you run the risk of ending up in a position worse than you started with. They currently get 80-90% of the ad impressions they try to display, which is pretty good compared to a hypothetical future where someone like Microsoft makes an adblocking-by-default browser and courts force Google not to block them.
- imglorp 3y agoVery surprised they haven't started this long ago. One might suspect the problem is ad play and click accounting. Anyway, when they start delivering ads in-band, the next step for blockers is to identify that first keyframe in the player by using a pool of shared signatures, right? So then player clients will need adblock plugins which will have a sizeable signature distribution infra and grief for clients. Then the anti-blocker might begin adding, per-play instead of per-video, a pixel or something to throw off the signatures, massively increasing THEIR video distribution infra. Ad infinitum?
- chii 3y ago> Ad infinitum? AI controlled adblocker is the end game!
- londons_explore 3y agoSponsorblock is almost this... But it uses real human labour to replace the AI, and works really well.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago>real human labour to replace the AI ah yes, AAI (Artificial-AI) AKA I (Intelligence), or "Crowdsourcing" if you're looking to use an older buzzword. I do think there's a few models trained on sponsorblock already, but they're not great.
- rpmisms 3y agoSponsorblock is absurdly wonderful, but needs an option to exclude certain channels. I want to watch Internet Historian's ads.
- tech234a 3y agoThe feature already exists [1]. [1]: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/547 https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/547
- userbinator 3y agowhich is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms. Many VCRs could do that, and stop/start recording to skip ads, as that was the only way to do it.
- asdgioanionio 3y ago[dead]
- mcdonje 3y agoThen how do they report back to the advertisers that the ads weren't skipped? Edit: Or make them unskippable?
- thrashh 3y agoI think a lot of people watch YouTube on their TV or phone or on a browser without an ad-blocker. I rarely watch YouTube on my laptop. I think Twitch users tend to watch on their computer mostly? And I think Twitch viewers are more techy so they would be more likely to have ad blockers. I have no data on any of this. I'm just throwing shit at the wall.