Yeah I think so. It goes back to the days of television, where I can watch TV and see ads without someone stalking me.

That would do, yes. But, if they keep changing the ads then it just uses up more power, as well as any cryptographic hash checking failing (they might not do such a thing, but the people should insist on formats of URLs with the cryptographic hashes in order to avoid this problem). (If they are also always same then also you can easily make the file to specify which parts of the video (such as ads, but it could be anything that you want to) which should be skipped. If there is always a key frame after each ad (which I hope that there should be), then hopefully it should be possible to save disk space by omitting the ads, too.) (Or, are YouTube going to get rid of all of the key frames to try to restrict user choice (and end up reducing reliability too)?)

Technically already happening by people themselves, except they call it "sponsored content".

It's so common that there's an addon for that:

https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock#sponsorblock

> Google muxing ads directly into the video feed, so...congrats I guess, freedom preserved?

I mean, yeah; if inlining the ads means the site doesn't spy on my machine and report back to Google then that's a big win.

Really? The endgame could be pushing ppl towards premium, but even then I don't trust google not to start showing ads for premium users.

If AdBlock and sponsorblock fail on yt I'll just leave for nebula.

If those ads don’t use rtb, yeah, freedom has mostly been preserved.

AI will fix this.

Exactly. Google is going to need to show you ads no matter what or charge you a monthly fee. You can dislike Google as much as you want but this is how trade works.

Let's get some common sense back.