this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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I don't think you'd need to re-encode the whole thing on the fly. More frigging the container data around, than the video/audio codec itself.
That way I could request some_pointless_video.mp4 and it sends me 95% the same thing as is already on their server, with adverts jammed into it at defined intervals.
They probably think they can win for now by messing with individual ad-blockers, but with 3rd party players becoming more popular, I can see that being a catch-all solution.
isn't this more or less what they're doing now? The difference is that the ads are coming from different server and have an overlay on top with a timer and a skip. As long as the ads are coming from a different server they will be detectable. Also as long as the ads have overlays they are also detectable. They would need to make the ads be served from the same server that serves the video and eliminate the overlays.
That's the difference. The ads are coming from somewhere else and displayed in a different way.
By injecting it into the stream, there's no way to detect that. To your player it would all look like it's coming from the same place. Instead of a ten minute video and a couple of 20 second ads, it's now just 11 minutes of video.
yes. But then they have different problems. Now it is the ad company who is responsible to serve the ads and the personalization comes from there. This is achieved by the client directly "asking" the ad company for ads. If they want the ads to come from the same stream this means that the customer identity is passed to youtube, then youtube requests the ads in behalf of the client, and then serves them mixed in the video stream. I'm not a lawyer but I think that this causes different legal problems for youtube on the part that they will need to ask the ads on behalf of someone else.
Also apart from that, technically, the part of the video that is an ad, will be associated with a call-to-action URL and an overlay on top of the video, since they need that by clicking on the video it will go to a the ad's call-to-action instead of just pausing the video. This will still make them detectable
The ad company is Google, no? So they already have that logic ready to go.
Does anybody actually click the ads in YT videos? The only clickable thing I ever see is "Skip Ad".
Clicks are a metric that Google/YouTube tracks to determine whether a business has to pay for that ad, so it's necessary for ads to be clickable.