3 ms·

We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client. They don't need any

We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client. They don't need any money to cover their costs; they're FOSS. As for YouTube's costs, they don't show YouTube's ads, so basically Google is covering the cost there, though perhaps not willingly. But Google makes the YT API usable by these apps, and after all this time hasn't done too much to try to shut them down. We'll see how long that lasts, but there seem to be real technical limitations to how much Google can force ads, without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.

Jensson 2y ago
> without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do. There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. That downgrades the user experience compared to easier to separate ads, but if they can see you watch videos without the normal ads they can always do that. But the main reason they don't is probably that they can't target such ads very well and it is more expensive to inject in a stream rather than send separate videos, so not sure if it is even worth it for them.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. You mean bake the ads into the stream? I don't think that's so easy to do in realtime. Even TV decades ago never did this AFAIK: they played the programming from one source, and then switched over to the commercial from another source (probably videotape) at the correct time. Anyway, if you're talking about permanently encoding the ad into the video, that really doesn't make sense. The ad probably won't be relevant to many of the viewers. YouTube is global, so if someone from France watches a cat video uploaded by an American and it has ads in English for Applebees restaurant, 1) they probably won't even understand it unless they happen to speak English and 2) there's no Applebees in France. The same thing applies if it's an ad for a restaurant that only exists in, say, California: viewers in New York aren't going to care, and the restaurant doesn't want to pay to advertise to viewers outside their area. Even worse, ads normally run for limited times, so YouTube would have to constantly re-encode videos to change the embedded ads.

Jensson 2y ago

> without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do. There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. That downgrades the user experience compared to easier to separate ads, but if they can see you watch videos without the normal ads they can always do that. But the main reason they don't is probably that they can't target such ads very well and it is more expensive to inject in a stream rather than send separate videos, so not sure if it is even worth it for them.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. You mean bake the ads into the stream? I don't think that's so easy to do in realtime. Even TV decades ago never did this AFAIK: they played the programming from one source, and then switched over to the commercial from another source (probably videotape) at the correct time. Anyway, if you're talking about permanently encoding the ad into the video, that really doesn't make sense. The ad probably won't be relevant to many of the viewers. YouTube is global, so if someone from France watches a cat video uploaded by an American and it has ads in English for Applebees restaurant, 1) they probably won't even understand it unless they happen to speak English and 2) there's no Applebees in France. The same thing applies if it's an ad for a restaurant that only exists in, say, California: viewers in New York aren't going to care, and the restaurant doesn't want to pay to advertise to viewers outside their area. Even worse, ads normally run for limited times, so YouTube would have to constantly re-encode videos to change the embedded ads.