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YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counteract ad blockers
(alternativeto.net)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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YT has 2 posibilities
I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.
Meanwhile a lot of content creators a changing to Odysee
That's not true. The way their streaming works is basically a Playlist of shorter fragments. They can easily insert their own fragments without obvious visual tells if they don't alter other elements of the page to indicate that an ad is playing.
But they will have to alter othet elements on the page. For example, scrubbing. It will either have to be paused at one specific timestamp while the ad is playing or the ad would have to be incorporated into the length of the video.
In either case, it is detectable.
The video chunks hash can be calculated and then blocked, in a crowdsourced way like with sponsorblock (but way more effective, because it will cover all videos)
The obvious solution to me is sponsorblock switching to sampling pixels out of each frame, like that project that encoded data into video streams (yet resilient to compression), there are algorithms that could fingerprint any ad with an extremely high degree of accuracy. It'd be more complex than the current implementation, but it'd also be more resilient. I'd settle for it hiding the video and suppressing the audio for the ads duration, possibly displaying a countdown timer, vs actually watching the ad. Then Youtube would get paid, but have no way of knowing you haven't seen the ad, and the metrics around their ad effectiveness would ultimately suffer, so users still win.
You could even go so far as to have the client cache the video, several minutes in advance, dropping all the ad frames, so it's a seamless experience for the user. I got money, but will spend 10x as much ensuring Google gets less from me. It ain't about money. It's about sending a message!
Wouldn't it show a Black screen for the duration of the add when you block it?
Not quite sure why, they simply could in the fly stitch those files together.
Twitch is doing that for a while now i think.
Exactly this. It isn't even really "stitching" as YouTube videos are served as a series of short chunks anyways. So you simply tell the player that there are a few extra chunks which happen to be ads. There is no video processing required it is basically free to do it this way on the sever side.
That is true. But then you could probably use the chunk length to determine where the ads starts and ends since there is with a very high probability an unusually long chunk at those times.
I don't know about YouTube but the chunks are often a fixed length. For example 1 or 2 seconds. So as long as the ad itself is an even number of seconds (which YouTube can require, or just pad the add to the nearest second) so there is no concrete difference between the 1s "content" chunks vs the 1s "ad" chunks.
If you are trying to predict the ad chunks you are probably better off doing things like detecting sudden loudness changes, different colour tones or similar. But this will always be imperfect as these could just be scene changes that happened to be chunk aligned in the content.
Actually the videos get stitched together dynamically.
Press X to doubt
Most people do not have an adblocker. Most people watch YouTube to varying degrees of frequency and duration. Most people will continue to watch the ads. I’d be surprised if YT noticed any amount of users leaving the site because of this. The privacy minded folk are few and far between.
Not precise. They can dynamically generate the video stream from the ad-free original.
If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn't, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.
Odysee is not an alternative
Better than any other- Well, there are some selfhosted video sites like PeerTube and others, but respect content are not a real alternative, nor other proprietary streaming sites, like removedute, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Front-ends or desktop clients (FreeTube) with the new YT policy will die. What other alternatives then?