this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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The simplest solution is to embed the ads in the video stream.
That's why we have the sponsorblock add on lol
But the ad blocking algorithm can notice the jump cut, (simple audio/video/meta data.) irregularities and then just jump forward to the regular video.
Those certainly are words, but how does this jump cut detection algorithm work?
Embedding an ad doesn't need to change any of the video stream information in a serious way. It's not like they're going to do something obvious like change the colorspace and encoding scheme several times just for ads, because that would provide artifacts for these types of mitigation techniques. And even if they did, how is that any different from changing the quality of the stream to continue serving video despite degraded or improved network connections? Google could decide to implement random quality changes and break this particular workaround.
Plus, if they're embedding ads into the data stream, how exactly is the metadata going to change? It's the same connection, served from the same location, over the same socket. It's not like sections of video need to have "AD" in the middle of their encoded data streams.
The "proper" solution here is to embed the ad in the stream and transfer the resulting higher with DRM protections. You can still probably get around it with add-ons like SponsorBlock, but that takes way more effort and YouTube could randomly distribute them in the video so they aren't as easy to detect.
It's totally possible and probably not that hard, so I'm grateful YouTube hasn't done it.
I'm guessing you never had to implement drm and caching on a large scale video cdn before.
No, but Netflix and other video services do it, so it's totally feasible. I assume most of the cdn infra YouTube already does would stay the same, the main change would be the insertion of ads (they already do video processing) and encryption (which is probably not that hard).
DRM adds such a massive amount of overhead and is an absolute bastard to implement properly. Plus, it's pretty easy to circumvent most DRM schemes when it comes to media.
Sure, but it's another barrier to entry, and it gives Google more license to sue under the DMCA.
Then people could fast forward past them.
I'd be fine with it, but advertisers won't be happy until you're forced to stand up, say "Mc Donald's", and then answer a short quiz about the ad that just played before you can continue.
They could block video scrubbing at ad markers. I'm not sure how easy that is to circumvent, but it's probably harder than the current ad blockers, which just block network requests.
Anything that causes the video player to behave differently during the ad is a clear marker to ad blockers that "THERE IS AN AD HERE!"
The hardest thing to block would be just making the ad a direct part of the video, which behaves like the rest of the video. This would reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers filtering it out significantly, but then users would be able to skip ads they don't want to watch and we can't have that...
Yeah, you're probably right. Randomly distributing it would also reduce the effectiveness of things like SponsorBlock.
Yup, it would be so easy to do it in a way that is difficult for ad blockers to remove and doesn't annoy the fuck out of the users, but it would allow users to manually skip them so they're not going to do it.