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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.

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Already exists: every content creator nowadays has a “sponsor” with sponsored segments (usually SquareSpace or NordVPN)

Blocked by: SponsorBlock

Next?: YouTube making it harder to skip around video

Blocked by?: Zoomers just alternating between videos, cutting in and out while the ads “play” silently, because they can never get enough dopamine

The result will eventually be a mixture of trusted hardware and software, from server to client to GPU to display, that will not display the content if any of that locked down blobby chain is not perfectly as it should be.

Even the concept of "changing the channel" is something to eventually lock down in this way; don't let the users change tabs or modify the window or display state at all until trusted ad content has verifiably finished.

The saving grace is that you'll probably be able to just get up and walk away until it's done, at least for some time.

Eventually this will require smarter and smarter neural networks to decide if something is an add or not. This technological warfare might lead to a simulation of the universe. Ar we an adblocker?

There was that web demo that auto detected ads on live radio using this. (It just switched to another station)

The same technology can be used to build undetectable ads.

> ... the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream

There has to be a reason why they haven't done that already. Perhaps they haven't worked out a reliable way to track ad impressions in the continuous stream. Perhaps they got it working but it's too resource intensive at scale.

Given the magnitude of revenue at stake, the other shoe should have dropped by now.

I already use sponsorblock, for the ads encoded in the video stream.

Yeah but presumably they won’t let you fast forward ads. AFAIK Twitch already does this, I’m surprised YouTube hasn’t.

Twitch has a timer in the corner for when the ads will be over. Seems like it’d be pretty easy to create an adblocker that looks for that and just blanks the screen out during ads.

Also seems like it would be pretty easy for twitch to remove the timer.

Well, absence of a fastforward option should then be a pretty solid indication there’s an ad running, which means… mute the audio and blank the video for a few secs

Sponsorblock does this well for sponsored segments, it even works on yt-dlp and you can download a video without the sponsored parts.

whoa amazing, thanks! It does make me mad that I pay for youtube premium and still have to see those sponsored segments.

Pirating was always a big part about convinience (and accesibility), not just money. Cracked games running without needing to scavenge for CD-rom etc.

You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free.

Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.

Honestly unsure what is taking them so long to try this; it’s difficult but totally possible technically, especially for YouTube. Is it because of something like the ad network can’t verify the creative separately from the hosting site?

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