Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.
The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?
Seems like a good use of AI/ML.
[Enshittification intensifies]
If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I’d probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.
This is exactly me.
I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.
Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.
I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.
So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.
Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).
I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
I’d prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don’t watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I’m willing to pay to not see ads, but I don’t watch enough to be worth their asking price.
Even then it doesn’t have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.
It’s crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
Quick! Everyone! Hurry up and climb over one another to proclaim your hatred for YouTube and their practices so that you can have more time to go watch more YouTube videos!
😆
The arms race continues.
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn’t have to be handled clientside.
Well the player and its controls are client side.
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Could you supply a source for this?
Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.
If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.
RSS feed -> yt-dlp script -> auto queue the folder into the player of your choice. Hmm…
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
Next step is machine learning to recognize ads and cut them out automatically hah.
Don’t need to go that far, i think. If you had your extension hash some piece of each keyframe (basically: tokenize some IDs for each keyframe) and submit them to a database you could then see which parts were shown to everyone vs only to some people and only display those. Basically similar to how sponsorblock crowd sources its sponsor segment detection but automated. Some people would see the ads but then you’d know what the og video was unless it gets edited.
This is assuming they’re not reencoding the video for each advertisement, which they probably aren’t. If they are it probably gets easier, actually. Sponsorblock could do that.
Oh that’s a smart way of doing it!
Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
I would love to be a subscriber if Google could guarantee that they won’t take my viewing information and then sell it to other advertisers or data brokers, or use that info to push ads on behalf of those brokers in other Google products.
As it stands now, why would I pay with my money AND my data? Google shouldn’t get to double dip.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
“Line go up” is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
“Line go up” is the animating force of the
agethe rich and powerful, the critical philosophical principal around whichour entire societytheir livesisare arranged.I choose not to confuse their values as mine or that of my community.
Thank you.
now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time… oef
I’m getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company’s relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
Line go up 💹
Hey don’t blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
As in my profits, our losses?
Honestly, I’ve kind of always wondered why they didn’t just do this. It’s always seemed like the obvious thing to me.
I mean, I hope it doesn’t work, because screw Google, but I’m still surprised it took them this long to try it.
I also wondered why they didn’t do this, but I think it’s tricky because the ad that gets inserted might need to be selected right at the moment of insertion. That could complicate weaving it into the video itself. But I guess they finally found a way to do it.
Yeah, I’ve thought the same. It’s like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
Because it’s much more expensive. What they’re talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
This isn’t how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the “playlist” (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is “different” from the rest of the chunks.
It wouldn’t cost any CPU with custom software that Google can afford to write. The video is streamed by delivering blocks of data from drives where the data isn’t contiguous. It’s split across multiple drives on multiple servers. Video files are made of key frames and P frames and B in between the key frames. Splicing at key frames need no processing. The video server when sending the next block only needs a change to send blocks based on key frames. It can then inject ads without any CPU overhead.
You’re forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn’t designed to do this
They’re already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.
Wouldn’t it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they’re also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the “skip 10 seconds” button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
It has to know which blocks to chose to get the next part of the file anyway. Except the next part of the file is an ad. So yes there is overhead but not for the video stream server. It doesn’t need to re encode the video. It’s not any more taxing than adding the non skip ads at the beginning that they already do.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.
This is not necessarily the case.
You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.
The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming
You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.
To say that it’s just much more expensive would be a huge understatement. This is not going to work, at least not in a near future…
I think more and more people are getting really tired of the ads, so it’s starting to affect their revenue a little bit with all the ad blockers.
this has more to do with they got caught lying about their ad numbers and inflated their ad prices. So now they are doing this to show their shareholders they are doing something to protect their revenue and thus keep their stock price inflated.
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
