- cross-posted to:
- enshittification@lemmy.world
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What took them so long?
Anyway. I’m sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
Adapt to what?
If they’re mixing the content with the ads server side, it’s going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn’t it? Where it’s all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we’ll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
If they’re predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they’re not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you’d need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
Dear Satan,
Your application for the Alphabet engineering position has been acce–[your message will continue after a word from our sponsors]
Honestly, I’d be happy to take the job and sabotage them from the inside.
We could use audio fingerprinting to detect ads in the buffer
Yeah that could work… What about creating some sort of *arr for YouTube videos that downloads them and processes them with some sort of AI audio/video processing to remove the ads and recombine the video.
Youtubarr it could be called. If we really want we can also remove the ads from the creator in the video too. It would still count as a view to the video too so creator won’t lose out on money.
Anyone with objections to this?
It’s a neat idea, but computer vision stuff can get quite computationally expensive when done locally and is prone to input poisoning attacks (especially if the models used are open source).
Not saying it wouldn’t be possible, but I think some of the other ideas posed here would be better starting places.
Or get the video once with a YouTube premium account and cut out anything that doesn’t match from the free version.
Oh, the diffing thing is clever!
There’s no such thing as “download the video”. It’s a stream of small chunks, which can be re-arranged by back-end in any way, shape and form.
I think it’s more like extracting raisins? ad contents are still separate from the dough. finding the boundary conditions or ads hashes is guaranteed to work. whether it is feasible for adblockers is a different matter yet.
Not really. Because there are no boundary conditions. Videos are not streamed as a one big file, they’re streamed as small chucks, like 5-10 seconds short chunks. Replace one chunk content randomly on the back-end with an ad and no ad blocker will be able to spot it.
the lengths required to defeat youtube automatic copyright detection even for short segments of videos suggests that it can be done. if it can be done with the resources of consumer devices that’s the question.
Their copyright detection doesn’t work in real time on consumer browsers during video playback.
Not comparing feasibility though? Only the flour/bread analogy. Injected ads however it is done will always not be a part of the original video.
Even if adblockers aren’t able to remove the ads, I’m sure they can still make it so you can skip over them with the arrow keys or video timeline.
That’s why I said “What took them so long?”
Adapt to what?
I don’t know, man. I hope they succeed. If they don’t, then I will never visit YouTube again.
Some other frontend that would allow me to fast-forward them would be fine, though.
It’s not that simple. Right now it’s still separate video streams but presented as if they were the actual video, put in a queue of sorts.
Ublock Origin released a script to block them yesterday btw
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
The value that Google has always provided as an ad platform is that they’re targeted ads. You can target estimated age, geographic location, gender, estimated income. You can target your ads so narrowly that only a single person ever gets them even.
To bake ads into the actual content stream they have to expend compute editing and re-rendering the video for as many times as they have ads that they intend to run on those videos. They can do it once with once batch of ads but then it’s only as targeted as who clicks on that video. Realistically they’ll want to do it 5x, 10x or more per video (and store every copie of the video, unless there’s some tech to store it as segments and seamlessly stitch then together as a single stream) to continue targeting the ads which gets very expensive fast
Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn’t. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.
They absolutely will. There are far more people (and probably smarter people to boot) working on blocking their shit than there are people at Google working on making it unblockable.
This is an arms race where they will win the occasional battle, but always lose the war.
Introducing our new surveillance-based, dynamically generated, native sponsored video ads with mandatory interactive minigame engagement.
Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that’s a lifetime IP ban.
Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that’s a lifetime IP ban.
And lose out on any potential future profits? Probably not. Especially if the IP is dynamic.
Dissidence detected. Terminating.
What possible response is there from adblockers to this?
Index the content of the ads, identify it, and drop that data from the served video file? There may be a more clever solution, but that’d definitely work. It should be possible to checksum or just straight up store the data for the first couple of kilobytes of video data that would uniquely identify each ad.
Youtube obviously must have a rota of however many ads which they can display, so eventually they’d all get identified although you’d be playing whack-a-mole forever as they release new ones. Isn’t Sponsorblock partially crowdsourced anyway?
This would be challenging and fairly expensive, but worth it if you were motivated by sufficient spite.
They say the ad is being integrated straight into the video stream on the server side though. It won’t be its own identifiable piece of data on the client side anymore.
Yes it will? The video stream is handed from the server to your browser or device. Once it arrives, your machine can do whatever it likes with it. Up to and including deliberately ignoring part of the data, and since Youtube videos are buffered your client can skip to whatever part of the video is past the ad provided it’s been buffered that far.
But how? Unless I’m misunderstanding how video encoding is done, you shouldn’t be able to reliably identify what’s an ad vs what’s actual video once it starts getting mixed together. The ad will be encoded differently for every video it’s inserted into.
I could be completely wrong about this, but the same ad clip’s data should end up looking completely different depending on any number of things.
Most encoding formats are deterministic, including the VP8/VP9 codec that Youtube uses. I imagine they could deliberately insert some manner of randomization in there if they really wanted to, and if they intend to carry through with this plan they may have to. But the same input with the same encoder (and settings) should produce the same output every time, at least if you begin counting from a keyframe.
Even if it can’t be identified on a binary level with clever tactics, which I think it will be unless they do some kind of picture-in-picture thing, it should be trivial with current hardware identify it even with a fairly crude optical recognition system and a database. I.e., sample N number of points on the output and gauge the average RGB data for each for a couple of frames, and if that matches our entry for the ad in our crowdsourced database, skip ahead X seconds based on the database. Even better if you did it on the keyframes.
Doing it based off of the audio of the ad should be even easier, since acoustic fingerprinting is a pretty cheap technology to implement these days.
The other question will be if Youtube is dumb enough to always insert the same type of ads in the same place in each video, which they may be at least to start with, so a very simple table of “skip X amount of time at Y timecode on Z video” would be feasible. Or even better, if they hard insert the ads into the video to save on processing time, such that they never change. Are they going to try to insert ads and encode video to serve to individual users in realtime? Doubt it. That’d be bonkers. Youtube already chews on uploaded videos for sometimes upwards of an hour before having them ready to serve… I don’t think they’re ready to commit to and pay for the compute power to try to pull a stunt like this in realtime.
All of this is going to require some manner of crowdsourcing, unless we get really good at using AI against them or something (which’d be immensely satisfying, come to think of it).
If a song can ne fingerprinted (e.g. Shazam), so can ads. Even when they’re part of a larger video.
Twitch does the same thing but you can still circumvent it. Worst case users may need a VPN to a country that doesn’t have many ads.
What part of the data?
The whole point of this is they want to meld the ad data with the content in such a way that there are no identifiers anymore.
If what you’re suggesting were possible, they wouldn’t be bothering with this.
Define “meld.”
If they’re encoding the ads and the content into the same video stream, which appears to be the proposal, your client still has access to the entire video stream and in fact must do so in order to play it.
Even if you’re not going to be able to identify an ad on the raw binary level, and my proposal to do that was just spitballing anyway, the world is just absolutely chock-a-block full of audio and video content identification technologies that could be co-opted to identify specific ads, at which point your client could simply not play the section of the video stream containing them.
If what you’re suggesting were possible, they wouldn’t be bothering with this.
You’re giving Google waaaay too much credit.
They tried other methods prior to this, and failed. So they thought those methods were effective, and they totally bothered implementing them.
Except with AI what’s to stop the advertisers from dynamically generating ads on the fly that are just ever so different from the original so as to throw off this kind of blocking.
Probably nothing, so don’t give them any ideas.
This is not feasible.
Explain.
For adblockers, not much. For users, mirror all of youtube’s content on a peer to peer network, and stop using youtube altogether.
How does sponsorblock does it, then?
Users can mark videos and submit that content. Users can vote on other users’ marking of content. It won’t work if YT streams the ads in if they randomly change the timestamp at which the ad(s) start.
Yup! Oh, I know how sponsorblock does it, but the question was more about highlighting that it’s theoretically possible. Unless they do what you describe.
It’s technically complicated, and requires more compute to do it server side.
I didn’t say it would be easy. But yup.
It doesn’t require any compute on the server at all.
Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I’ll be choosing that over watching ads.
I’ve done something similar by mixing two extensions together in times where unlock origin wasn’t keeping up with YT changes (ad muting extension plus auto skip extension). It worked really well for when you had the video in the background of a game or work, and if I were solely watching the video it was just a trigger for a phone break during the video
If they do it properly, you won’t be able to do it.
There will always be a way
Can you skip ads on live TV? No.
With a DVR? Yes.
When ads are a distinct bit of content recognized by the client, then the casual user with the stock client/no add-ons can’t overcome the UI choice to block you from seeking unless youtube lets you. But this allows ad blockers to skip even downloading the ad, because it’s clear what is content and what is ad.
If the ad is completely “just part of the stream” with zero indication where ads begin and end, then you can at least seek back and forth, with not even the official client able to block you from seeking, because it doesn’t know where the ads are either. The client downloads the stream.
If the stream is accompanied by some metadata letting the client know when to block seeking, then ad blockers can use that to auto-seek.
I suspect the last one is going to be the case, because they both want to limit seeking during ad, and they also want to change things to an ad experience so that you ‘click through’ to what the ad is trying to get you to do.
You can fast forward on yt though :p, so unless they remove that for the duration of the ad (in which case an addon could possibly use that to determine if an ad is being played) you could at least skip it manually. And maybe there’d be a crowd sourced solution to somehow determine the actual videos beginning (like detecting the first frame of the actual video or something, idk).
Image Recognition could attatch the first frame of an ad to the length of time the ad plays for, then add it to an online DB a la sponserblock.
They might try to block seeking during these sections, but YouTube usually has raw mp4 streams available under the hood. You can even pull them using invidious or newpipe. Take that out and we might be fucked.
A good way to block this kind of thing is just to use DRM. Most platforms now provide a completely blocked off and secure hardware DRM solution that makes it impossible to grab video frames or view decrypted data in any way from the host operating system or any app running on it.
Ripping the video segments would just give you encrypted and useless data without the license.
These kinds of systems would need to be attacked by HDMI or other downstream hacks, or an HD video camera pointed at the screen in a dark room :)
Its bad enough they use widevine on their free movies/shows but the idea of them requiring widevine for regular YouTube sounds awful.
Hopefully legacy clients/devices will stave that off until something else comes along.
Show me the image recognition API in the browser docs :)
I don’t know youd be able to do it within a browser extension but something like newpipe or yt-dlp?
Public Invidious Instances would be tough because that’s a lot of load to stick on a server, especially one run by a hobbiest. But self-hosted single/low user instances could also feasibly do this.
Obviously its gonna take a good bit of work, but it IS doable.
Train an AI to detect ads and voila
Product review video, blocked. Product is mentioned in a video, blocked. Product is shown too long, blocked.
“AI” isn’t smart enough to do it and it would require your computer to be powerful enough to not convert videos to PowerPoints.
Product review video, blocked. Product is mentioned in a video, blocked. Product is shown too long, blocked.
Sounds like a win-win situation. 🤷♂️
Lmao
It’s fairly easy to block any user access to video buffers using DRM
In the extremely rare event that I watch a youtube video on a my phone, and an ad comes on, I mute sound and literally turn my head away. Advertisers can’t do shit about that lol.
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).
If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn’t trying to do anything remotely like that.
This specific example is one thing that self hosting is arguably better for. I’ve made a few shitposting memes and the like that are five seconds long and uploaded unlisted just to share with friends that get immediately flagged and banned for DMCA that I’ve taken to just self hosting them. They’re getting like three views anyway because the world was never meant to see them.
People sharing videos with friends and family seems like a problem that’s already solved, if you really don’t want to use YouTube. Big channels that get millions of views are the real issue.
Self-hosting, certainly (to a degree anyway). But the Fediverse isn’t self-hosted. I’m not keeping a catalog of comments on my computer that you lose access to when I close my laptop.
Self-hosting also tends to require dedicated hardware. Less of a big deal as the real cost of your own personal little server setup has plummeted. But still something that’s predicated on always-on internet connectivity in a way that’s not always practical.
The other issue with self hosting is while I’m comfortable running web services on a server in my house on my local network I know I lack the competence to harden my server sufficiently to open up a web streaming interface to the web.
It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
- Resolution
- Frame rate
- Quality
- Bit rate (file size)
- Encoding complexity
- Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
- Robustness for dropped or corrupted data
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
Great analysis
It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running.
Indeed. Yet they still add stupid features like 8K video and high-bitrate 1080p. What the heck are they doing? Who needs more then 720p anyways?
An engineer who needs a line item on their CV to get promoted.
Seriously though, 1080p is not a lot if you’re on a big monitor or TV. At 720p you can start pixel counting on some displays
How about people just host videos on their own infrastructure or rented VPS? Honestly the idea that creators should get paid by YouTube/Twitch/etc confuses me. Those services if anything should be charging creators money as they are providing them computing resources.
Goodbye YouTube. Hello…?
PeerTube. Except nobody’s going to use it until everybody uses it.
It needs to start with the illegal route and just upload all of YouTube’s content on there, then gradually start paying content creators for their work, and become legitimate. This is how crunchyroll got big.
Load it to what? Who’s going to pay for all the bandwidth and storage. How much are y8u willing to host? Peertube is never going to take off because it well cost users and people like free.
People like free as in not having to put in your credit card. But they don’t mind seeding, as evident in piracy.
That’d require a bit more knowledge than the average YouTube user has, unfortunately.
Who’s going to pay for all the bandwidth and storage.
The users – it’s all bittorrent.
Just add “decentralized web3 mining” somewhere in the page and crypto-dipshits will host the shit out of it. No actual cryptocurrency nor even a whitepaper required.
You’re right, but I dream that one day enough people will realise that the “free” model is shit and be willing to pay.
I’d love to support a content producer on peertube who hosts their own content - the proviso being that their content is engaging enough to want to watch.
Kind of bootstrap paradox
It’s called network effect
I just went and looked to see if peertube is remotely viable… technically seems working. I found an app on f-droid, got on a bigger instance (1k users seems about the biggest). Videos load and play. There isn’t much content at all. A real shame. So yeah we don’t have an option
Other than using Patreon or something on the side, I don’t see how anyone is going to make money off of creating Peertube content, either. Becoming a millionaire Youtube star à la Mr. Beast or Linus or whoever the fuck is obviously every aspiring videographer’s goal on there, whether it actually happens or not, and that inherent commercialization draws creators to the platform regardless of whether or not we think it’s for good or for ill.
Peertube, if it ever takes off, will probably be like early Youtube in that the people posting to it will be enthusiasts who want to, not personalities doing it in the hopes of getting rich. That might be a good thing, depending on how you look at it, but don’t ever expect the kinds of ultra-produced, professional content we see on Youtube these days coming from people who can afford to hire camera teams, video editors, sound people, scriptwriters, on-location shoots, etc., etc.
I upload my videos there. Started off because professor wanted us to record ourselves then I just uploaded whatever. It’s not much but it’s honest work.
PeerTube doesn’t have the allure given by the chance of getting paid for what you upload
you can still get paid but you’ll need to make your own revenue stream.
deleted by creator
…PeerTube!
it hurts so much that it is VERY hard to replicate youtube given the insane upkeep costs. I would leave in a fucking heartbeat but so many good creators only post there
Yeah, I keep hearing that Youtube has probably never made a net profit.
Not because they couldn’t but because they willfully operated at a loss to quench potential competition. The reason there is no replacement on YT is that all the content is on YT and creators won’t shift to other platforms because their whole audience is on YT as well.
YT is not a video sharing platform anymore, it’s a market. And that’s why it sucks so bad.
There’s no way to know, Google doesn’t report YouTube profit separately in their financial statements. The closest department is “Google services” which does have a 34% profit margin.
And this will be more expensive to implement than regular ads, thus margins will be even thinner…
it’s hard to replicate, has high upkeep, big authors’ community. it seems YouTube deserves to be paid despite all the negativity towards it.
I could sit here and throw out all the bad shit YouTube’s done but quite honestly the fact that its owned by google is enough justification to not give them money lmao.
This is where we need to start harnessing AI for our advantage rather than corporations. Have it scan the videos as it buffers and automatically remove the ads.
This seems like it ought to be possible? Seems that way to me as a lay person anyway.
comskip.exe does it well on free to air TV, but I suspect the methods it uses might not work so well for Sponsorblock etc. That said, maybe a hash can be made of the video every ten seconds, and when the playback hash differs, skip that ten second block. Computationally intensive I suspect, but might work for embedded ads.
Only works if google inserts ads without re-encoding the video. I think that’s possible, as long as you only cut only keyframes of the video (shutter encoder has a feature to cut without re-encoding, and it warns of this limitation)
And then Google sues the AI provider to stop them from doing that.
AI is not our tool, it is a corporate tool, for corporate profits, that they deign to let us dabble with, but only when it suits them.
There are plenty of open source ai, especially these single purpose one.
You could probably train something like that on semi-reasonable consumer hardware. Ads often have a very distinctive style and tone, and you need only a single output - the probability of it being any given second being an ad. It would probably take a lot to run though, you better hope the people who install the extension have good PCs. And, it would probably never get 100% accurate, you’d have to put up with still seeing some ads and having to rewind when it skips over valid video.
it might even be ridiculously simple given that ads almost 100% of the time have louder audio than the content by design.
It’s usually even easier than that… In my jurisdiction, ads have to be clearly labeled and identified. It should be relatively trivial to detect this label.
I’ve decided I’m going to do freelance ads for free for exposure on a comment by comment basis while I drink this refreshing iced cold Coca Cola.
That sounds like the perfect beverage to keep my reactions razor sharp while I enjoy the split-second thrills of playing League of Legends with my attractive, ethnically diverse friends.
It was about time, was always strange that Twitch did it first, and just like over there I’m hopeful some clever people will still make scripts capable of blocking ads.
When I see an ad on the internet, I purposefully look away to not look at it.
It is deeply ingrained in my brain to never let ads win.
I don’t know how my parents are doing it with cable TV.
You should start using an adblocker then, like uBlock Origin.
BTW I do that too
Of course, I use uBlock Origin.
But sometimes, I’m on a fresh install or on a friend’s computer and I forget that I don’t have an ad blocker.
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They could have fucking paid me…
Twitch did it already, it’s not impossible
and twitch is still adblockable. it does look harder though, it bugs out sometimes. i’m sure there will be a great solution, there always is.
and fuck google while i’m at it, adblocking is only growing because of how egregious ads are getting.
Yeah, definitely not impossible. I had to install some TamperMonkey scripts to get Twitch adblock working, but it works.
oh tell us about the script you use!
Oh well.
This sucks but they need to keep turning up the dial so more people jump over to peertube.
As much as I want something like that to happen I don’t see it happening for video platforms. Since most people wouldn’t switch platforms from YouTube since the creators they like are on YouTube and those creators won’t switch platforms cause they won’t be able to make a living on another platform unless it’s another big one like TikTok. The only alternatives to YouTube that have really worked are more niche subscription platforms like Nebula and Floatplane. Which only work as an additional platform to YouTube as a way to get some extra stable income that isn’t ad dependent.
I agree in that its probably not the right time in 2024.
I also don’t think bittorrent is the right tech.
That said, as yt becomes more toxic there’s more demand for alternatives.
The most realistic solution is probably eventually breaking up Youtube on grounds it’s a monopoly. The political will doesn’t exist atm, but that would solve the problem of YT having no competitors and would mean competitors would come with infrastructure already.
I don’t see this as very realistic because, as you say, there’s no political will.
Creation of a derivative work without author’s consent solely for the purpose of monetisation - sounds legally dubious to me as you couldn’t claim fair use.
You think Google didn’t already think of that? From Youtube’s ToS:
Right to Monetize
You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.
Displaying ads on or within - definitely
Modifying content and distributing the modified content? That’s a trickier one.
It really isn’t
Nice thought, but precedence has been around 80 plus years with TV ads…
:(
Not technically true - the movie reel itself wasn’t altered.
It was swapped out for ads, and the same is true for digital formats. Here, they’d be actively modifying and distributing a modified file.
TV companies actively edit parts of the movie out constantly.
Yes they do, they skip parts definitely.
From the average viewer’s perspective, it hasn’t changed from before, unless you’re using an adblocker. And as youtube wasn’t sued before, I doubt they will be now.
Damn! I wonder if yt-dlp will get a workaround for this.
I doubt it. You’ll have to edit your videos after download. Learn ffmpeg and you can probably pipe the content in there and cut it out in one line.
With Avidemux, cutting videos is super easy
So if the ad is injected directly into the stream does that mean users don’t need an ad blocker and can just fast forward through the ads? I’m fine with that.
I wish…
If it’s impossible to fast forward the ads, that means the timestamps of the ads have to be send to the browser, so adblock should be able to use that data.
My guess on how they will handle it. The ad segment will get tagged as an ad and operations as fast forwarding(etc) will be disabled as long as an ad is playing.
operations as fast forwarding(etc) will be disabled as long as an ad is playing.
That would be easy for an add-on to detect and if nothing else mute the tab and cover the video until operational control is restored. A button I could click to “pause video once ad is finished” would make this a convenient time for me to step away.
That was just my first instinct on how YpuTube may solve their issue with adblocking. I don’t know how they will do it, but they won’t allow you to skip the ad by fast forwarding.
YouTube has two options:
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Inject the ad into the stream making it indistinguishable from the video. This allows users to skip it if they don’t want to watch it. (I would prefer this honestly)
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Try to force users to watch ads by making them unskippable, this makes them easy for add-ons to detect.
Inject the ad into the stream making it indistinguishable from the video.
That, luckily, is completely illegal over here.
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I’m curious how this will affect creators. Now it is very obvious when YouTube is displaying an ad vs the content creator doing an ad read. If it becomes less obvious where the ad is coming from by injecting it into the stream, I wonder if they’re hoping to shift some of the perception of excessive ads off of them.
This isn’t really representative of how server side ad injection works, it doesn’t imply anything being different about the UI when it comes to ads. Many of your favorite streaming apps use SSAI, you still get the ad indicators.
It’s just that the content and the ads are both coming from the same source, so that makes it challenging to block ads by deny-listing ad serving domains, the same infrastructure is serving both.
