this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.
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.
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.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.