[chmod775]

YT is too big for people who hate ads to not invest a massive effort. The ad blocker endgame will be YT videos being "pre-watched" by a headless browser running in the background and the video data grabbed from there (either recorded or directly). You then watch the ad-less video in a custom frontend. If implemented correctly there's pretty much nothing YT could hope to do about this.

[briHass]

Sounds like how DVRs worked on cable TV back in the day. Some were even sophisticated enough to use the typical video cutout before commercials to auto skip them on playback.

Now, of course, we have community efforts like SponserBlock that could easily identify ad locations or some form of auto detection based on analyzing the video of they insert the ads at random locations in the video stream itself.

I'm certain this is coming. There's very little on YT I need to watch right now, and having a bunch of videos already downloaded and de-ad-ified would suffice. It would prevent the mindless watching anyway.

[BLKNSLVR]

Wasn't one of Kimdotcom's ventures scraping YT videos for the creation of his own streaming platform at some stage?

Seems like slightly less of greasy activity now than it was then.

"Count eight" about halfway down the page: https://cip2.gmu.edu/2015/09/22/lets-get-real-about-kim-dotc...

[Buttons840]

I'd even be cool with just blanking my screen and muting the sound when an ad is playing. Given my usual YouTube watching mindset, a brief moment to to just breath would be good for me.