[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.