3 ms·
This is a simple cat-and-mouse game, but what are the major possible escalations in the future? How expensive would it be for YouTube to encode the ad directly
by yreg 3y ago
This is a simple cat-and-mouse game, but what are the major possible escalations in the future?
How expensive would it be for YouTube to encode the ad directly into the video stream?
If that ever happens I can't see any blocking solution other than have an AI pre-screen the content, identify ads and jump over them.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoForce users to login.
- bejd 3y agoThe SponsorBlock [0] addon has already solved that for sponsored/ad segments in videos. Rather than AI, crowdsourced timestamps lets it automatically skip past adverts. [0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
- yreg 3y agoYeah, but that's trivial because the sponsorship is always the same content at the same timestamp and with the same length.
- wongarsu 3y agoSponsor segments are baked into the video stream by the creator, yet the sponsorblock extension exists and is really good. They just crowdsource the labeling of sponsor segments (and other segments, like intros, subscription reminders etc). Youtube could try to serve everyone a different video stream with ads added at different times. But even that's unlikely to work: around the turn of the century we got DVRs that could automatically skip commercials in recorded television signals, and later DVR software could do the same. There are a couple of techniques to do that, but the most obvious is that commercials and commercial blocks have common lengths and very different sound from the actual program (louder and mixed differently). The same techniques would work on Youtube ads. And of course most of the youtube ad revenue seems to come from a somewhat limited selection of ads, so fingerprinting the video stream for segments that reappear in different videos across the userbase is also a viable technique. This is an arms race youtube can't win, no matter how much money they are willing to throw at video encoding.
- iowemoretohim 3y agoThis would be totally ineffective against targeted randomized ads baked into the video. It works with sponsor segments only because content creators can only submit one version of their videos.