[SeanDav]

I wouldn't have thought a minimal interface is required for YouTube.

If your internet connection is too slow to handle a more detailed interface, how on earth is it going to cope with doing something like streaming video and sound?

[Quarrelsome]

I think the idea is barely. Thus the adverts and extra load hurt the experience too much. Consider that it might take some time to load the video, now add in the advert on top of that and it might no longer be worth it.

[st3v3r]

Yet the advert is what's paying for the video and the bandwidth.

[imglorp]

I wonder if YT will begin inserting ads directly into the video file server side. If you download the file to watch elsewhere, you get the whole package. Viewers can skip the ads manually, or wait for someone to write a program to detect scene changes and hope to skip the ads automatically. Then we're back to the TIVO model.

[thatcat]

I doubt they will do this because they serve custom ads to each user, and to split and merge video files is considerably less efficient than just loading different files.

[Something1234]

Can't some video formats be concatenated? Something like this pipeline for serving the ad:

    cat $(select_ad_file $user) $video_file

[thatcat]

I know ffmpeg can do that, i've never tried just using cat.

An additional reason for not serving ads in the video file is that their ad clients probably want to know if someone watched it or not. By loading ad as a file associated with the ad client it's easy to verify that someone watched the ad and didn't just click out after 1s, etc.

[CaptSpify]

Speaking for myself: It's not the bandwidth, it's the slow, laggy, intrusive interface that causes me problems. I can play videos just fine, but videos and a mountain of bad JS can make any of my computers crawl. Additionally, it just looks terrible. I'm here to watch a video, not look at videos that you incorrectly seem to think I'd be interested in.

[ShinyCyril]

Bingo. I don't care for the comments or any of the 'related' clickbait videos.