3 ms·

Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down. TBH baking it into the video stream is probably the easie

Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down. TBH baking it into the video stream is probably the easiest path. The whole video doesn't have to be re-encoded if the ad is spliced in. This is a "soft lockdown" since the ad can theoretically be manually skipped by the user, but its probably good enough.

dylan604 3y ago
baking into the video stream loses their ability to auction off ads in realtime to customize ads per viewer based on all of the analytics they've hoovered up on that viewer. they aren't doing the hoovering to go back to old school pre-determined ad placement
- acdha 3y ago
  It makes it harder but there’s no technical reason why they couldn’t assemble the video on the fly and splice in ads seamlessly based on the same selection logic they used now.
  - mlhpdx 3y ago
    Personally, I’d just start generating temporal IDs for all content (user or ad) so there was no way to know what the stream contained w/o something prohibitively expensive on the client side. Permalinks, since they’re necessary would just redirects (to a temporal URL). A temporal URL here uses different random looking values for the each user rather than a fixed one (like a URL shorter), and encode a validity window (not before/after). The core idea here being that the code in the app doesn’t know the difference between ads and user content, which would make it very difficult for any intermediary to do so. And, if if they did the URL for the “real” content wouldn’t work until the time to play the ad had passed - so what’d be the point in bothering? Like others have said - ya just have to pay for the things you value. No shame in being thrifty, but as I learned from my first employer: pick great suppliers and never force them out of business.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Splicing ads into a video is almost instant, but its a technical change as mentioned above.
drdaeman 3y ago
I wonder when they’ll completely forgo HTML and will just start serving giant polymorphic/obfuscated WebAssembly blob that would perform all the rendering
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  They would have to sacrifice compatibility with browsers that can't handle the webassembly, right?
josephcsible 3y ago
> Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down. I really hope that that would be enough to finally coax the antitrust regulators into doing something.

dylan604 3y ago

baking into the video stream loses their ability to auction off ads in realtime to customize ads per viewer based on all of the analytics they've hoovered up on that viewer. they aren't doing the hoovering to go back to old school pre-determined ad placement

acdha 3y ago
It makes it harder but there’s no technical reason why they couldn’t assemble the video on the fly and splice in ads seamlessly based on the same selection logic they used now.
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  Personally, I’d just start generating temporal IDs for all content (user or ad) so there was no way to know what the stream contained w/o something prohibitively expensive on the client side. Permalinks, since they’re necessary would just redirects (to a temporal URL). A temporal URL here uses different random looking values for the each user rather than a fixed one (like a URL shorter), and encode a validity window (not before/after). The core idea here being that the code in the app doesn’t know the difference between ads and user content, which would make it very difficult for any intermediary to do so. And, if if they did the URL for the “real” content wouldn’t work until the time to play the ad had passed - so what’d be the point in bothering? Like others have said - ya just have to pay for the things you value. No shame in being thrifty, but as I learned from my first employer: pick great suppliers and never force them out of business.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Splicing ads into a video is almost instant, but its a technical change as mentioned above.

drdaeman 3y ago

I wonder when they’ll completely forgo HTML and will just start serving giant polymorphic/obfuscated WebAssembly blob that would perform all the rendering

brucethemoose2 3y ago
They would have to sacrifice compatibility with browsers that can't handle the webassembly, right?

josephcsible 3y ago

> Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down. I really hope that that would be enough to finally coax the antitrust regulators into doing something.