Re:Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp
by phantomathkg on Saturday March 15, 2025 @11:56PM
(#43376856)
Server Side Ad Insertion is a production technology used by many OTT services, so it is not something new.
What it means is adblocker can block the reporting API, but you still get to watch the ad and cost the streaming provider wasting money to splice the ad.
Re:Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp
by chii on Saturday March 15, 2025 @11:36PM
(#43376788)
it isn't cheap to splice a video.
Even if they do it via some sort of chunking, then it's possible to skip chunks easily too (aka, relatively easy to bypass given the amount of effort to implement).
Not to mention it's hard to do caching this way imho.
They stream the commercials separately on purpose, because this makes it a whole lot easier for them to track ad impression metrics. Splicing the ad within the same feed is technically quite feasible and indeed almost trivial, it doesn't even require a re-encoding of the entire video. So we can assume that they're avoiding that for a reason.