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A comment on German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal. Parent comment

Re:German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking sof... by diafygi on Sunday December 11, 2016 @11:10AM (#13151628)
I think back in the early days Hulu served their video and ads from the same url format, so you couldnt distinguish. That's not how they do it now, but back then it successfully defeated adblockers.

For example, if you were watching a TV show, it would give you a playlist of video segments and ads, all having random urls (hulu.com/<uuid>). You couldn't tell which was an ad and which was the real video, so adblockers couldn't write rules to block them.

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Re:German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking sof... by userbinator on Sunday December 11, 2016 @12:26PM (#13152027)
VCRs with automatic ad-skipping (during playback or recording) appeared in the 90s, and had many orders of magnitude less processing power than even a typical smartphone today. They had to deal with ads embedded directly in the video stream, and worked reasonably well. Perhaps a similar approach will work very well with digital video today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping

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