Easy - they just get more pernicious. For an example, try this product placement in I, Robot, back in 2004:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HpIZrOH4zc

Even though it's set in the future they manage to sell them as being retro cool. It's almost impressive.

I take the pessimistic viewpoint that ads are going to seep in no matter what. The harder you make it, they more they'll mask themselves. Personally, I'd prefer banner ads.

product placement != invasive advertising. advertorials blur the line a bit, but it's not the same as plastering animated "they hate this ohio school teacher for knowing the secret of eternal youth!" ads all over my news. (free bonus: every 2,000th ad includes a free flash-delivered root kit!)

plus, with a transparent AR setup with proper overlay ability, you can in-reality block photons bounced off or emanated from advertising units (billboards, bumper stickers, old spice commercials, etc) from even hitting your retinas.

Again, IMO, but product placement is worse. I know invasive advertising is advertising. Mentally speaking it's quite easy to disregard. Product placement slowly blurs the lines to the point where you don't know if someone is honestly advocating for a great product or if they're being paid to do so.

If you are watching something produced by a production company (anything on TV or any movie) every brand you see is paid placement.

It's like how before a movie comes out, all the actors in the movie go on all the talk shows. Think it just happens by magic coincidence? It's contractually part of their job to appear and promote the properties they appear in so it drives up demand for their productions (movies/books/tv shows/congresscritters).

>If YouTube did transcode pre-roll ads, we'd have an auto-skipper.

Don't respond to user seek commands until the add is done playing - at that point best they can do is block output and wait - which ends up a similar experience to just watching the ad for classic 2-10 min video youtube browsing or songs - for longer content buffering could work.

For me personally the change between "30s pre-feature ad" to "30s pre-feature darkness/silence" is more important than the change from there to "start playing straight away". I don't mind waiting, but I don't want things fighting over my attention.

Yeah, but is it really worth it for the server to keep track of when the ad should be done playing and refuse to deliver the rest of the stream until then? Because trying to do that in Javascript is a losing game.