[peer2pay]

It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.

[esperent]

It would break all the time stamps as well, unless you had fixed length ads. Sponsorblock already skips ads embedded in videos, so I don't think this would make ads much harder to block.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

True, it would be sorta impossible to make timestamps work without sending the length of the ad section, so you could easily skip it programmatically.

[cyberax]

> HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.

If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.

[oneseventwonine]

Agree, it has to do with cost, considering the sheer number of videos they have. Plus, oftentimes the ad won't be relevant after a week or two, in which case they can't re-encode again.