[hendersoon]

Yes, it's become an arms race. However it seems like it's one YouTube can't win, due to some limitation in their process flow. You'd think it would be trivial, just don't send the video if the user hadn't first watched the ad, but for some unknown reason YouTube is unable to do this.

Since YouTube ultimately can't win with their current strategy, it's difficult to understand why they're bothering. Everybody running uBlock Origin clearly wants to block their ads, it's trivial to update filter lists to block them again, and those people (like me) will never, ever, pay YouTube so long as we can get the content without doing so. All they're doing is annoying people to no particular benefit.

Instead they should work out some way to do what I said earlier. But they haven't. Because they can't? Sure seems that way.

[colanderman]

I'm surprised media companies haven't developed something akin to HDCP for attestation that a display has shown an ad to a user. Once you have private keys in display devices it seems like the obvious next step.