I wonder when they’ll completely forgo HTML and will just start serving giant polymorphic/obfuscated WebAssembly blob that would perform all the rendering

They would have to sacrifice compatibility with browsers that can't handle the webassembly, right?

backing into the video stream loses their ability to auction off ads in realtime to customize ads per viewer based on all of the analytics they've hoovered up on that viewer. they aren't doing the hoovering to go back to old school pre-determined ad placement

It makes it harder but there’s no technical reason why they couldn’t assemble the video on the fly and splice in ads seamlessly based on the same selection logic they used now.

Personally, I’d just start generating temporal IDs for all content (user or ad) so there was no way to know what the stream contained w/o something prohibitively expensive on the client side. Permalinks, since they’re necessary would just redirects (to a temporal URL).

A temporal URL here uses different random looking values for the each user rather than a fixed one (like a URL shorter), and encode a validity window (not before/after).

The core idea here being that the code in the app doesn’t know the difference between ads and user content, which would make it very difficult for any intermediary to do so. And, if if they did the URL for the “real” content wouldn’t work until the time to play the ad had passed - so what’d be the point in bothering?

Like others have said - ya just have to pay for the things you value. No shame in being thrifty, but as I learned from my first employer: pick great suppliers and never force them out of business.

Splicing ads into a video is almost instant, but its a technical change as mentioned above.

> Another option is to require Chrome for playback outside of authenticated apps, and lock Chrome down.

I really hope that that would be enough to finally coax the antitrust regulators into doing something.