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Why don't they just splice the advertisements in with the videos and play that instead? I know that would take a lot of crunching on the servers as different a

Why don't they just splice the advertisements in with the videos and play that instead? I know that would take a lot of crunching on the servers as different advertisers come and go, but it seems like a simple "fix", at least from a business point-of-view. Maybe they need to be able to align products with individual users.

bicijay 3y ago
Lets say they have a contract with a company for X months, what would they do after those months? Iterate every video file and remove the old ad? Imagine the scale of this when you have millions of videos and thousands of advertisers
- _flux 3y ago
  I wouldn't expect to be computationally hard or fundamentally even very difficult to construct the streams on-demand, assuming they would already have the videos encoded with parameters that's compatible with the stream they are pushing out. They are already pushing out videos segment-by-segment and edge-computing is a thing.
barrkel 3y ago
Eyeballs are auctioned to the highest bidder in real time, as I understand it. And don't forget geo and language ad targeting constraints, no point showing American ads to viewers in Germany, or vice versa. Even if you splice on a geo & language basis, there are two basic kinds of interest-based audience targeting: content and users. Putting ads on topic-specific content is OK for brand advertising, but you got to watch out for saturation - you're wasting money if you show the same ads over and over again to the same person. So you want to stop showing a brand ad if someone has seen it too many times already. Showing ads based on user interests has better performance for action campaigns. It relies on some way of tracking the user and / or their interests, but it leads to better conversion as part of a marketing / sales funnel. So you need to select the ad dynamically based on the interests of the user. All this adds up to making it hard to avoid dynamically choosing the ads to show. I think it's still probably possible with careful I/O to do the media stream concatenation server-side, and I expect it's probably the direction things will eventually go, as long as latency etc. works out.
amoshi 3y ago
Apart from the other comments, this also could be defeated by something like SponsorBlock - tldr it's an addon with crowd sourced data for skipping video segments, e.g. intros, outros etc
michaelt 3y ago
Contrary to what the sibling posters are saying, they could do this if they wanted to. Most modern video formats can be sliced and spliced at certain frames without needing to recompress or anything like that. If you operate all your own cache servers (which youtube do, AFAIK) you could splice a different ad into every stream, in real time. Youtube would have to be careful, as plenty of users are used to being able to refer to timestamps in the video. Right now people are used to telling someone the interesting bit is 2735 seconds into that video lecture, and that's a time without ads counted.

bicijay 3y ago

Lets say they have a contract with a company for X months, what would they do after those months? Iterate every video file and remove the old ad? Imagine the scale of this when you have millions of videos and thousands of advertisers

_flux 3y ago
I wouldn't expect to be computationally hard or fundamentally even very difficult to construct the streams on-demand, assuming they would already have the videos encoded with parameters that's compatible with the stream they are pushing out. They are already pushing out videos segment-by-segment and edge-computing is a thing.

barrkel 3y ago

Eyeballs are auctioned to the highest bidder in real time, as I understand it. And don't forget geo and language ad targeting constraints, no point showing American ads to viewers in Germany, or vice versa. Even if you splice on a geo & language basis, there are two basic kinds of interest-based audience targeting: content and users. Putting ads on topic-specific content is OK for brand advertising, but you got to watch out for saturation - you're wasting money if you show the same ads over and over again to the same person. So you want to stop showing a brand ad if someone has seen it too many times already. Showing ads based on user interests has better performance for action campaigns. It relies on some way of tracking the user and / or their interests, but it leads to better conversion as part of a marketing / sales funnel. So you need to select the ad dynamically based on the interests of the user. All this adds up to making it hard to avoid dynamically choosing the ads to show. I think it's still probably possible with careful I/O to do the media stream concatenation server-side, and I expect it's probably the direction things will eventually go, as long as latency etc. works out.

amoshi 3y ago

Apart from the other comments, this also could be defeated by something like SponsorBlock - tldr it's an addon with crowd sourced data for skipping video segments, e.g. intros, outros etc

michaelt 3y ago

Contrary to what the sibling posters are saying, they could do this if they wanted to. Most modern video formats can be sliced and spliced at certain frames without needing to recompress or anything like that. If you operate all your own cache servers (which youtube do, AFAIK) you could splice a different ad into every stream, in real time. Youtube would have to be careful, as plenty of users are used to being able to refer to timestamps in the video. Right now people are used to telling someone the interesting bit is 2735 seconds into that video lecture, and that's a time without ads counted.