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If the war on ablockers continues things may escalate, and the next step will soon mean deploying stronger DRM, in the same way that was tried in the fight agai
by tux3 3y ago
If the war on ablockers continues things may escalate, and the next step will soon mean deploying stronger DRM, in the same way that was tried in the fight against piracy.
There's a real parallel between the two. Streaming killed piracy for a while because the service was easy and convenient, with everything in one place. Then, streaming added more and more ads all while it became more fragmented. Now if you pay for a service, you will still see ads, and you have an increasingly limited catalog (even on Youtube, as creators move extra content on Nebula or Patreon)
The more Youtube squeezes and pushes ads, the more demand there will be for adblockers.
- vbezhenar 3y agoThe end game is encrypted DRM stream (which is decrypted in the display) with encoded ads (so you can't block it tinkering with JS). I guess that only abundance of devices without DRM is stopping this scenario.
- ethbr1 3y agoOnly general purpose computers are stopping this scenario.
- richwater 3y ago> encrypted DRM stream Widevine already exists and is increasingly difficult to crack, especially the key levels required for 4k content. > encoded ads Only a matter of time before hardware encoders can do this on the fly
- tomrod 3y ago> The end game is encrypted DRM stream That's not the endgame -- Digg:Reddit::YouTube:Vimeo is the end game, IMHO.
- alkonaut 3y agoHow are the ads even skippable on YouTube? I have never really had a good answer to that. I mean, why is the ad even a different stream or detectable on the client? Shouldn't the ads just be spliced into the videos if you really want to make sure people watch them? Is it because it would be prohibitively expensive to do that kind of live encoding for each viewer?
- jack_pp 3y agoYou wouldn't even need live encoding because every YouTube video is normalized and if you have two streams that were encoded with the same parameters you can cut and concatenate without re encoding
- meindnoch 3y agoBecause you could just seek over them?
- alkonaut 3y agoYes, but the server knows exactly what frames it has sent you and when. If you don't want to watch the ad frames there's nothing the server can do, but it can make sure to not send you the frame that comes after the ad, until the 10 seconds of the ad has passed since it sent you the last frame before the ad.
- tux3 3y agoThat works for pre-roll ads, forcing the client to silence them and wait at best (I believe the Twitch streaming service does this) For mid-stream ads, that doesn't work. You could pre-fetch the ad and surrounding video early, so that you can watch buffered content while the server thinks an ad is playing.
- alkonaut 3y agoThe server would need to not allow buffering further than the next ad.
- m-p-3 3y agoAnd with Microsoft pushing TPM requirements with Windows 11 it's just a matter of time before thing are locked down even further.
- judge2020 3y agoWhat is it with the disdain for paying for services people use? People often don't feel like paying for it even if they use YouTube more than other streaming services combined. Maybe the issue is that people got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality videos for absolutely free?
- arcbyte 3y agoActually I'm very predisposed to paying for YouTube. My experience with it however is that it presented me with ads for YouTube premium every 5 minutes and put ad screens in my way that were waaayyyyy to easy to click dozens of times a day. It wouldn't take a hint that I was interested but not ready to buy. I was trying to show someone a quick video on my phone, not revisiting my financial relationship with Google. After being treated like that, as much as I have the money and willingness to pay, I don't want to give them my money for a purely emotional reason. Some product manager somewhere at Google needs fired. Probably a lot of them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lapinot 3y agoWhat is it with the disdain for mental health, privacy or political mindfulness? Big tech don't feel like paying attention to people even if people use Youtube more than other streaming services combined. Maybe the issue is that big tech got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality tracking for absolutely free?
- friend_and_foe 3y agoIt's not disdain for paying. Netflix proved that. It's disdain for getting nickel and dimed and fleeced and losing access without warning.
- ertian 3y agoWell, and there's a difference in usage. When I use Netflix, I'm usually either at my desktop computer or sitting on my couch, selecting a movie for myself to watch. It feels like a good old traditional media experience. YouTube pops up everywhere, on every system I use. Sometimes I'm sitting down to watch something longer, even a movie, but often it's just links from friends or coworkers, or from news articles on Reddit or Hacker News. Sometimes it's lessons, sometimes it's breaking news, sometimes it's 5-second meme videos. I use it at work and at home. I might be on my wife's iPad, or my work phone, or some library computer. I'm not viewing all those videos on my personal devices logged in using my own personal account. I don't feel comfortable logging in with my personal account everywhere. And there's something especially annoying about constantly seeing ads on a service I'm paying for. On top of that, logging in everywhere lets Google track everything I view--every random Reddit click--and Google's the single biggest data collector & exploiter I know. I'm paying them to let them track me. All told, paying for YouTube feels kinda icky in a way that paying for Netflix does not. I do pay for YouTube Premium, but I still prefer to watch videos without logging in, (ed:) with an adblocker.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]