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I'm a little surprised Google doesn't bake all the ads directly into the stream at this point, making it extremely difficult to separate them.
by beej71 3y ago
I'm a little surprised Google doesn't bake all the ads directly into the stream at this point, making it extremely difficult to separate them.
- guerrilla 3y agoExtremely difficult? No. SponsorBlock already removes in-stream ads. If things get more complicated, ML will be employed. It's an arms race but so far things seem to be on our side. Long-term, I don't know.
- 0x073 3y agoThey could just block buffering this video until the time of the ad is finished on serverside, as they know how long the ad is. You still can block ads but you must wait if you see a black window or an ad stream.
- guerrilla 3y agoWe can just buffer manually and wait. It's an unsolvable problem without DRM, and even then...
- treyd 3y agoThis whole approach would massively increase the cost of distribution due to how CDN networks scale.
- 9991 3y agoA silent black screen would still be a win. Ads are disinformation.
- flakes 3y agoYep, I'm tired of fighting the arms race with twitch ads, so I just mute the video now and do something else for a few minutes. I would honestly be perfectly happy with a black screen for 30 seconds as a compromise to ads. I only leave the twitch webpage because the visuals bother me almost just as much as hearing the stupid sales pitch or the goofy "lol we're so cheeky and random" jokes made non-stop by insurance company ads.
- PhasmaFelis 3y agoI'd rather a silent black screen than an ad.
- 101008 3y agoI can't understand people using SponsorBlock. Basically you want people creating videos for free?
- shiroiuma 3y agoMe watching a sponsor segment isn't going to make any money for the video creator. They're being paid by the sponsor to place the segment in their video; there's no way for the sponsor to track who watches it. The segment is just a waste of my time. This is separate from YouTube itself tracking who watches the video, and for how long (and if they skip any), and if they watch any ads, and then giving a bit of money to the creator for the ad views.
- 101008 3y agoYes, but if SponsorBlock or any other solution like that starts to become popular, sponsors will stop paying creators.
- shiroiuma 3y agoLike it or not, the whole way "free" services on the internet work with ad-blocking, and always have, is that the people blocking ads are taking advantage of technological measures to avoid them, so that the actual cost of serving content is paid (by ad-viewing time) by all the suckers who don't know how to block ads, or don't want to for some reason. It's basically like that with sponsor segments, though here I think it's more like a television or newspaper ad: the sponsor is simply hoping enough people will watch the segment and go buy their stuff (since it's personally recommended by the content creator!!) to make their sponsorship investment worthwhile.
- kzshantonu 3y agoHow is it fair for creators to take my premium money AND force me to watch sponsor segments? That's double dipping. YouTube should have a system for marking segments so premium users don't have to watch those segments. Premium users pay with premium money and free users pay by watching YouTube ads + sponsor segments. Fair in my book
- endisneigh 3y agoThe end game isn’t embedded stream, it’s attestation
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI've heard things along these lines, but always as an aside. Can you expand on this? Like, YouTube would only work in a browser environment which has been approved by Google? and which has promised not to be running in headless mode? And which promises to have validated that there is at least one authentic retina looking at the screen? What is a reasonable end game situation to be working on countermeasures for, and what is tinfoil haberdashery?
- AlexCoventry 3y agohttps://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/google_web_environment_integrity/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/google_web_environmen...
- bakugo 3y agoThe end game here is to simply turn all personal computing devices into locked down ecosystems that the user has no real control over, basically what iOS already is (and Android isn't too far off from). All code being executed on the device, from the bootloader all the way to the browser or youtube app, must be approved by the manufacturer, with an opaque black box security chip inside the device verifying that this is true and providing a signed message as proof that has to be sent to Youtube servers before videos are served. This completely eliminates the issue of both adblockers and third-party frontends.
- oxygen_crisis 3y agoAfter that, impression tracking just needs to start covering some of that gap of air between your brain and the screen. Let's throw in some attention-detecting cameras so you can't skip the ads by looking away from them.
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- ggeorgovassilis 3y agoSince ads are personalised, this would produce a new stream per view which would come with a computational overhead. The stream would have to be rendered on the spot and not in advance, which puts further pressure on compute resources during peak times. That would decrease margins, maybe so much it isn't feasible at all.
- shiroiuma 3y ago(Disclaimer: I don't know that much about video codecs or editing.) I'm surprised they don't just break the video at key frames and insert the ads that way. From my little use of open-source video editing tools, it seems like this is pretty low-CPU to do, and if (like YouTube) you don't care about a good user experience and are happy to just insert ads at seemingly-random places instead of between natural breaks in the program (as with TV shows), it should work.
- ggeorgovassilis 3y agoYou are probably right, eg Losslesscut in Linux does exactly that: no transcoding, no overlays nor any editing other than cutting and moving around sequences from the same video. Editing and exporting such videos is blazingly fast. Adding a bit technical context (for readers) to your comment on inserting ads at "random places": many codecs use the concept of an initial frame [1] which would place technical restrictions on where the ad could be inserted. If Youtube believes that ad timing is too important, they might not accept technical restrictions on the timing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
- hellweaver666 3y agoI would be very surprised if this isn't either in progress or done and just waiting for the right opportunity to roll it out.
- IndySun 3y agoAren't Ads dependent on cookies, location, search history etc., such as it is, so remain flown in?
- scosman 3y agoSimple: no benefit to serving ads you can’t count. YT doesn’t care about serving ads, they care about ad revenue.
- cannonpalms 3y agoWhat is about embedding ads within the primary video stream itself that suggests they would not be countable?