this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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I'm expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there's no way around it. They'll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.
The sponsorskip extension already has the functionality to get around something like this.
Yeah but that's because the content creator cannot dynamically change the time at which the sponsored part is. For ads, Google could dynamically insert ads at every 1/3rd of videos with a variation +- 1mn, and there's nothing an extension like sponsorblock could do without triming on the original video's content.
A solution to that would just be to save a snapshot of a video frame every second or so, then skip segments that don't match.
great use case for ai
Disadvantage of said system for Google would be the fact that if you do that, people can skip ads much faster and they won't be able to do any tracking of interaction at all. For advertiser's point of view, that would be just worse version of TV commercial.
You could do banner ads, shrink the video, randomly add a banner to top/bottom and a 2nd left/right. If you skip the ads, you skip the content too.
That’s how twitch does it.
It’s been very effective at making me watch less twitch, but it does serve the ads no matter the adblocker now
TTV LOL seems to be working for me, at least when I last watched Twitch a few days ago.
I also use a modded app on Android and s0und on Android TV and neither have ever failed me.
And TiVo already has the tech to skip ads in recorded media. I only point this out to show that it is possible to do context based filtering and skip to timestamps. Smart programmers will find a way, and the war continues.
I'm hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .
I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.
Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.
These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I'm not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90's and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we're winning.
At that point you might just end up with some kind of YouTube 'piracy' with Premium subscribers uploading mirrors to Peertube servers or something.
Hell, I'd support it with my home server if someone made a containerized service for it. Just start uploading my subscription feed somewhere for other people.
This already happens in audio podcasts, it's annoying as hell