I don’t see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
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DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
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Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They’re just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They’re also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It’ll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
I’ve tested making new subdomains, it’s literally minutes in real life. Sure, in some pathological case it might be hours, but it’s not actually going to happen realistically.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it’s unknown to caches, it’s updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
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Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a “Download and edit to watch ad-free” world with this change.
I accept having to wait until the video downloads past the ad. Certainly not going to watch the ad.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a “report ad” or “see the product” buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
It’s not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can’t skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don’t have them, ytdl also doesn’t download them.
As of now, afaik, you won’t see them if your account wasn’t selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you’ll see the normal ads and then the video).
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I’ve only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
It’s probably going to be like twitch. I’m sure they’ll eventually succeed in making it so you can stream videos without watching ads but they’ll never be able to stop people from downloading the video and skipping the ad in vlc.
Can’t you block ads on twitch?
In live videos they replace what you’re watching
That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There’s already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
It doesn’t recognize the sponsor sections. The community does that. I don’t believe there is any tool right now that can automatically detect the sponsor sections.
The whole point of having ads be separate from the video is for youtube to easily distance itself from malicious ads. If an ad is malicious it can easily be reported and taken out of commission. But if ads are now part of the video, what stops an ad from being an ISIS beheading clip in the middle of a video made for children? If there is still a way to still report it, then there is a way to recognize the ad.
Also how will this interfere with creators? Editing a video and giving it a proper pace is already a huge challenge. But now ads can just be automaticaly cut into it without the creators control? That’s gonna fuck up so many quality channels. That’s already a big problem with the current system, bit at least you can skip or block them.The ads are not part of the stored video file, they are sent in as chunks of the stream in place of the actual video. When the ad is done, the regular video starts playing again. They are not “editing in” anything to be permanently stored as part of an uploaded video.
Yes. The way it works now is:
- Play video until ad timestamp
- Pause video and fetch ad from ad server
- Play ad
- Resume video
But presumably with the new system, your computer will just receive a continuous bitstream with ads embedded in them. What was previously happening on your machine through HTML or JavaScript and was detectable by ad blockers, will now happen on YouTube servers beholind the scenes.
Humanity accepts your challenge! See y’all on the battlefield ;-)
lights molotov cocktail
…
“are we not going to do that, or…? asking for a friend, of course”
That comes later but I like the energy.
We can do it the old fashioned way
You can solve any problem with a Molotov cocktail. Any time I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom, right away, I had a different problem!
Where is that image from?
A show called ‘The Good Place’. Good show imo.
Ah ok cool, thanks I watched I think the first season. Need to finish it.
But we fixed this already, it was called TiVo…
then i won’t be using it much, if at all.
It’s what they always should have done anyway. I’m not so entitled that I think I should get content delivered absolutely free, but I am entitled enough to sandbox and restrict how many discrete domains my browser windows will talk to.
YouTubes past moves have been to make it impossible to block adds. What else is new in the world?
Is water still wet?
deleted by creator
So… whats stopping something like sponsorblock from nixing this potentially bankrupting choice?
Very little most likely. I was reading some of what the sponsorblock dev had to say about this and the tone seemed to be “meh, there will be a way around this”.
Time.
“Virtually impossible?” I haven’t had ads on YT in over 6 years, and I don’t even use a blocker or alt client.
Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.
you’re actually helping by lowering the amount of revenue they have to shuffle offshore and hide from the feds.
some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
I’m wondering how the hell YouTube even makes money in those regions then. They must operate there at a massive loss.
Myanmar’s average internet speed looks to be around 10-20mbps, so they probably stream with lower quality. Their GDP per capita is ~$1,150, so ads being shown to people in Myanmar wouldn’t be worth much anyway.
What would be terrifying about it?
On the surface it sounds like a gross overreach of government.
A government that hates ads as much as I do. Truly a nightmare scenario
Trust me, I hate them also. But they also fund a lot of great things. And there are ways to have ads that are not invasive or omnipresent.
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
It kinda depends where. GDPR in the EU is certainly an example of governments imposing their will on corporations. In the US, not so much, as corporations dump tons of money on lobbying that allow to them influence how they are regulated.
Myanmar, as a country, has a GDP of 62.26 billion usd.
Google has a market cap of 2.17 Trillion usd and made a profit of $305 billion usd last year.
Google makes more money in profit than moves through Myanmar in a year by nearly 5 times. If Google chooses not to operate in their country because of some law they don’t like, what’s to stop them?
Google definitely has national government level influence, especially considering the pervasiveness of their product suite. Implying that they’re above the law might be too far, but they for sure influence it.
If the most extreme happens and Google decided that some EU law was too much to deal with compared to the gains, a lot of Europeans could find themselves in a position where Google doesn’t operate in their country. Imagine every Android device becoming unable to use the majority of the service they operate on, or the most common browser, search engine, email service, and video streaming services simultaneously being disabled. I can’t imagine the people will be very happy about that.
‘oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary’
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
Good to know. I’d rather pay for a vpn than YouTube premium.
I’ll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I’ve had to go without an Ad blocker, I’ve seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they’re almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! … And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they’re most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.
That’s why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate
And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
Oh, bundling. I thought societies were pleased to get rid of cable bundling, why is it coming back?
Because Netflix didn’t dismantle the capitalism machine.
Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It’s always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that “disrupts” the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.
Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.
But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?
Lol right!
I think so, but with ads just like the free tier of Spotify.
Does Ublock Origin not work for it anymore? And for phones, there are alternative apps - I use InnerTune.
I use ublock on my phone as well. I set it up to play through FF and never access the YouTube app. Did it for my gf when she complained of ads, and then did it for my self it was so easy.
I don’t remember the last time I saw an ad between us.
I don’t watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.
Ads will probably stop me from watching YouTube completely. The huge surge of ads at some point was what stopped me from using Instagram.
Unstoppable ads are what stopped m from using twitch.
The occasional times I need to use Twitch I either VPN to Romania or use S0undTV.
You’re not paying to not see ads. You’re paying for the content on the platform. You can pay either by watching ads or by paying for premium.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for and-free access to the content.
This is not true, creators get paid for Premium user views.
They get money from premium views. I believe they get significantly more per premium views than an add view.
This is true, no matter what ElevethHour and their downvote brigade want you to believe.
They get the most money by just donating trivial amounts to their Patreon. That should be the standard. I assure you $5 one time to a creator is more than they’d ever make off you with Ad revenue.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
This is not true. If you’re a free user they’re getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you’re a premium user they’re getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.
Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
It is expensive, but it’s hard to quantify that expense for a cloud provider like Google. They’re liable to use their market prices for cloud services to justify the “cost” when they want to make it look more expensive than it is. They’re already building a cdn for all their other services as well, so YouTube’s cost is baked into that.
Reddit, by comparison actually pays for cloud hosting for all it’s video services and so pays out the ass.
TIL I should be posting hundreds of AI-generated long form video essays to reddit.
Serving the videos is where they really get hit, not necessarily storing them.
Well, damn, there goes that idea.
I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.
Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies
There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
peertube exists. it’s activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)
edit: hey i just found a movie station!
I’m not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
peertube uses webtorrents to share bandwidth among users: if you’re watching a video, you share the data to other users at the same time.
despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
In general, yes, when comparing images/video of the same resolution. But if I compare an 8k image to a low quality video with low FPS, I can easily get a few minutes worth of video compared to that one picture.
As you said, it definitely costs money to keep these services running. What’s also important is how well they are able to compress the video/images into a smaller size without losing out on too much quality.
Additionally, with the way ML models have made their way into frame generation (such as DLSS) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing a new compressed format that removes frames from a video (if they haven’t started doing it already).
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn’t match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
Imagine thinking they can’t detect when you try to skip forward during an ad.
They can’t. They have no clue where you are currently in the video, and even if they did run some client side script, you could easily spoof it.
That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
Yes, that’s why I’m proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
Yes, that could be an alternative to computing hashes, I don’t know what option would be less resource intensive
Finding and innovating new ways to fuck people with ads.
