[londons_explore]

I don't think youtube really cares if you pirate their content or use a 3rd party client.

What they care about is you wasting their bandwidth. For an ad-supported video streaming site, bandwidth is normally more expensive than revenue - Google only manages to make it just about work because they have probably the worlds cheapest bandwidth due to being able to bully ISP's into peering with them for free. (they don't let you peer with Google for just Google Search but not youtube).

All these throttling measures are simply trying to reserve most of the bandwidth for real users, not people scraping all the content.

[chii]

Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms.

They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later.

Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.

[imglorp]

Very surprised they haven't started this long ago. One might suspect the problem is ad play and click accounting.

Anyway, when they start delivering ads in-band, the next step for blockers is to identify that first keyframe in the player by using a pool of shared signatures, right? So then player clients will need adblock plugins which will have a sizeable signature distribution infra and grief for clients.

Then the anti-blocker might begin adding, per-play instead of per-video, a pixel or something to throw off the signatures, massively increasing THEIR video distribution infra. Ad infinitum?

[chii]

> Ad infinitum?

AI controlled adblocker is the end game!

[londons_explore]

Sponsorblock is almost this... But it uses real human labour to replace the AI, and works really well.

[rpmisms]

Sponsorblock is absurdly wonderful, but needs an option to exclude certain channels. I want to watch Internet Historian's ads.

[tech234a]

The feature already exists [1].

[1]: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/547

[extraduder_ire]

>real human labour to replace the AI

ah yes, AAI (Artificial-AI) AKA I (Intelligence), or "Crowdsourcing" if you're looking to use an older buzzword. I do think there's a few models trained on sponsorblock already, but they're not great.

[YurgenJurgensen]

...which will be countered by AI-enabled midroll ad generation. A neural network that splices two video clips together must already be a thing, right? The advertisers would probably want this even without adblockers, since everyone already has an adblocker in their mind called 'inattentional blindness'. Using AI to subtly segue into the ad rather than cutting would stop some portion of users from tabbing out, checking their phones or just going AFK during ad breaks.

[thrashh]

I think a lot of people watch YouTube on their TV or phone or on a browser without an ad-blocker. I rarely watch YouTube on my laptop.

I think Twitch users tend to watch on their computer mostly? And I think Twitch viewers are more techy so they would be more likely to have ad blockers.

I have no data on any of this. I'm just throwing shit at the wall.

[mcdonje]

Then how do they report back to the advertisers that the ads weren't skipped?

Edit: Or make them unskippable?

[userbinator]

which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms.

Many VCRs could do that, and stop/start recording to skip ads, as that was the only way to do it.

[londons_explore]

splicing video is pretty easy - there are certain points - key frames - where video streams can be spliced with nearly zero computational overhead, no loss of quality, no loading delay, etc.

[chii]

i dont think what's stopping google is a technical difficulty problem, but a scale problem (as well as a lack of real need atm).

I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos).

It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the edge.

[londons_explore]

Adblocking is very much on googles radar. But they realise it is a cat and mouse game - and whenever you start playing that game, you run the risk of ending up in a position worse than you started with. They currently get 80-90% of the ad impressions they try to display, which is pretty good compared to a hypothetical future where someone like Microsoft makes an adblocking-by-default browser and courts force Google not to block them.

[zh3]

Indeed, we've done exactly this with production quality adverts where we'd add real-time information (e.g. betting odds) into the ad at selected points.s