Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti...
by acdha on Saturday October 28, 2023 @12:56PM
(#38051384)
It’s more work since that’s switching from shoving bytes over a network socket as quickly as possible to knowing where in a stream they can start inserting new frames, and they have to have versions of the ads in each format and resolution, but I’d be surprised if they haven’t already built that so they’d know exactly where the threshold is when more ad views pay for the additional hosting costs.
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Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti...
by Terretta on Saturday October 28, 2023 @01:09PM
(#38051511)
We developed and used that technique in production in the 00s, it's surprisingly easy with HLS, and doesn't cost more. On the contrary, being able to segment that way costs less as you only need to cache hot segments on the CDN and sequence/assemble on the fly based on server side ad inserts and client side player controls.
We didn't try it with VP8/VP9 (previously On2 / Duck TrueMotion) or whatever Google seems to prefer to push instead of the emerging "standard" challenging Flash back then, so I can't comment on that particular flavor.
Much more difficult if you're trying to support multiple types of streaming to multiple eras of clients (e.g. legacy TVs and handsets with earlier YouTube clients), as they surely still have to.
Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti...
by acdha on Saturday October 28, 2023 @02:07PM
(#38052035)
Thanks for confirming - basically my fear is that if ad blocking continues to grow, it’ll lead to an even bigger moat for YouTube because Google will be able to tell advertisers they have the resources to do it but self-hosting won’t. Whether or not that’s actually true, I’d expect them to find a receptive audience.