I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can’t differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can’t prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it’s an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.
I worked at a video ad server that offered a stream stitched solution going back to 2013. It comes down to development work/cost that the companies need to take on. Ultimately they would benefit from the cost required, but they wanted to be cheap and do a client side solution instead.
The HLS integration we offered definitely had a premium attached to it as well as an additional cost to the CDN that required the integration to live on. So it’s not cheap.
It is weird that Google, with it’s infinite pockets, hasn’t pushed a stream stitched solution all these years until recently.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
You are correct, which goes into the cost category of doing a stream stitched integration. Also, when I left said ad server in 2016, I think I recall HLS streaming primarily supported by Apple devices. Devices like Roku’s (don’t quote me on that) didn’t support it at the time so a lot of companies looked at where the majority of their streaming was occurring and decided it wasn’t worth the hit.
As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.
Twitch already does this for their livestreams and has been doing it for years. I’m just surprised that YouTube has taken this long to get around to injecting advertisements into the video stream. Although I think if YouTube decided to try ad injection the adblocking community would fire back with something novel to thwart their efforts and the eternal arms race would continue.
If there’s timed annotations (like say for closed captions or chapters/sections), then there will be some sort of mechanism to line them up with the modified stream. Then compare that with a stream without ads (which might require manually removing all ads or using a premium account where ads aren’t inserted) and you’ll be able to estimate regions of the stream where ads have been inserted. If the timed annotations are dense, you could see where the ad begins and ends just from that.
Also if the ads themselves include timed annotations, there would be a difference in that meta data that would give it away immediately.
Or if ads are supposed to be unskippable, the metadata will need to let the client know about that. Though they could also do that on the server side and just refuse to stream anything else while it’s serving an ad.
Given that, the solution might be to have a seperate program grab the steam and remove the ads for later playback. Or crowdsource that and set up torrents, though that would be exposing it to copyright implications.
I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can’t differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can’t prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it’s an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.
I worked at a video ad server that offered a stream stitched solution going back to 2013. It comes down to development work/cost that the companies need to take on. Ultimately they would benefit from the cost required, but they wanted to be cheap and do a client side solution instead.
Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don’t know the numbers maybe it’s still cheaper.
The HLS integration we offered definitely had a premium attached to it as well as an additional cost to the CDN that required the integration to live on. So it’s not cheap.
It is weird that Google, with it’s infinite pockets, hasn’t pushed a stream stitched solution all these years until recently.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
You are correct, which goes into the cost category of doing a stream stitched integration. Also, when I left said ad server in 2016, I think I recall HLS streaming primarily supported by Apple devices. Devices like Roku’s (don’t quote me on that) didn’t support it at the time so a lot of companies looked at where the majority of their streaming was occurring and decided it wasn’t worth the hit.
As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.
Twitch already does this for their livestreams and has been doing it for years. I’m just surprised that YouTube has taken this long to get around to injecting advertisements into the video stream. Although I think if YouTube decided to try ad injection the adblocking community would fire back with something novel to thwart their efforts and the eternal arms race would continue.
The most likely situation is just having apps that watch the content, trim the ads off, then drop it off into a folder.
You get home, watch your downloads, put it up for the night.
I’ve read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven’t looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.
If there’s timed annotations (like say for closed captions or chapters/sections), then there will be some sort of mechanism to line them up with the modified stream. Then compare that with a stream without ads (which might require manually removing all ads or using a premium account where ads aren’t inserted) and you’ll be able to estimate regions of the stream where ads have been inserted. If the timed annotations are dense, you could see where the ad begins and ends just from that.
Also if the ads themselves include timed annotations, there would be a difference in that meta data that would give it away immediately.
Or if ads are supposed to be unskippable, the metadata will need to let the client know about that. Though they could also do that on the server side and just refuse to stream anything else while it’s serving an ad.
Given that, the solution might be to have a seperate program grab the steam and remove the ads for later playback. Or crowdsource that and set up torrents, though that would be exposing it to copyright implications.