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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

They could refuse to deliver the main video content until the minimum ad time has passed?

Watching a blank screen is still a huge quality of life win.

Exactly what happens on Twitch (that or a low quality version of the stream) if you use the few anti-ads that still work. And I don't mind that, if I do, I usually stop watching and move to something else... especially because their ads are even more annoying than YouTube, often multiple consecutive 30 seconds ads, unskippable. I do not know who watches these, especially when they cut something happening live.

I'd say the low quality version of the stream is far better than the purple screen.

I'm using uBlock Origin and haven't seen an ad on twitch other than for a day or two about a year ago, in years. (Daily Twitch watcher)

You might be in a country/region in which advertisers don't buy ads. But for quite some time now uBlock Origin isn't enough to block ads. Also if you are subbed/Twitch Prime to a streamer or have Twitch Turbo it might spare you a lot of ads too.

There must be something different about how some of us are using uBlock Origin then - none o that applies to me, yet I only very rarely get ads for a day or so. I'm not even logged in to Twitch.

I have never seen any ad on Twitch either and I am a very irregular user as well.

My guess is they don't show ads to guests before they reach a certain amount of frequent visits.

I have never paid a penny to Twitch, nor been given a gifted sub. So it's no that :) I know for sure my country has ads, as occasionally I load twitch app on my phone and it's unbearable.

I've never been a big consumer of Twitch, in part because I don't understand how they can decide that now you're going to forcefully miss the next minute of content.

In TV movies or YouTube, the actual content gets paused so that at least makes sense, it's just an interruption. But in Twitch it's like if they put ads in the middle of a football game! Imagine being interrupted for ads and back to players celebrating a goal.

Another thing Twitch does badly is to put ads on my face not even 30 seconds after joining a channel. Psychologically it feels like I haven't had time to get invested in the content, so it's not worth it to put up with the ads, and it makes me move somewhere else or close the tab.

On Twitch, the content creators can decide when to play an ad. They usually apologize for "having to do so", but they preferably do it at boring times in a match.

You might be interested in https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions. A combination of its vaft uBlock script and using a VPN connected to somewhere in Austria has kept me pretty much ad-free for years.

True, but what if they start encoding the ads into the stream?

something like below extension. Relies on crowd (end users submitting time ranges) to skip unwanted parts

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo...

That wouldn't work for dynamically injected ads that could be at different timestamps and have different lengths for each user.

Some sort of checksumming to detect segments differing between users would probably be doable.

I think you under estimated the cost of your solution, the cost must not excess the profit from the ad.

You need hard work on the encoder to do that (at least to segment video, because re-encoding dynamically is obviously not an option). Not profitable for Google.

Aren't there codecs that don't carry state across keyframes? Wouldn't it then be trivial to split a video at a keyframe and insert new content?

Sounds like it would be just as trivial to detect the split at the decoder level.

Why? How would you determine if the content that comes after the split is an ad? What if YouTube has 1000s of versions of the same ad, of which they insert one after the split?

Shazam-style audio fingerprinting can help.

The same applies for regular ads on websites. If the ad is delivery alongside the content, it can’t be blocked. But the industry doesn’t want this. They want cheap delivery of extremely targeted and tracked pushing of micro optimised advertising. That’s a reason to ad block alone. If a digital newspaper had the same ad for everyone on their website, with no tracking, I would be ok not to ad block it. That isn’t the creepy ad business I am inclined to block.

Indeed, this is one possible end game, if we cannot block the ads from our computers, we can at least block them from our ears and eyeballs.

I view ads as a reminder to myself that I should maybe be doing something else with my time. I would love an ad blocker that blanked my entire computer screen for the duration of any ad, it would be a great chance to breathe and stop doom scrolling.

Someone someday will build an extension that will replace ads with "AI" generated video to fill in the blank.

You could also just have a system that predicts which videos you are going to watch next / soon, and preloads them in the background, so that the minimum-ad time will have already passed by the time you are giving them any attention?

That seems a lot simpler to do?

I would definitely pay $100+ for an HDMI dongle that would black-out/mute cable TV commercials for my parents.

Arms race towards people running their own private YouTube instances which pre-fetch subscriptions and recommendations to skip ads. If the video hasn't been downloaded already it pretends to play the ad in the background while waiting. A minor inconvenience, but hardly the end of the world.

Be even easier if they provided an MRSS feed! I wonder if a popular channel on YT started making their content available in an easy to parse format like MRSS if they'd notice a significant loss in YT viewers in favor of it. Of course, they'd then lose the ad share, so probably not a thing that will happen.

How fast would YT issue a C&D if someone created an app that did this for you so that you just entered in the channels you follow, and then it would just check every so often for new content?

You're describing Freetube. I use YouTube daily without an account, ads, or algorithms.

https://freetube.io

Happy user here as well.

How reliable is it? I used one of these apps from the F-Droid store (can't remember if it was this or NewPipe) but reliability was poor.

It's desktop aplication.

How unrealible NewPipe was for you?

Unreliable enough to say "screw this" and use the regular app and set up pi-hole

Pi-hole is not able to block ads on YouTube entirely. They are not DNS based.

That link didn't work for me but the github repo is here: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp

https://freetubeapp.io/

Shout-out Nebula, an alternative YT/creator platform which has no ads or sponsor segments. It's a monthly subscription but fairly cheap, and it gives you access to all videos on the platform (unlike patreon which is for a single creator). The monthly subscription cost is then split between all creators on the platform.

It's not a 1-1 alternative to YT as creators have to opt in, so most (imo low effort) videos/creators won't be on there. It's fantastic for any tech/engineering/history/news though, high quality/effort vids with no bullshit.

Note: I have no vested interest in Nebula, I'm just a user that's happy to support good creators and a platform that's actively opposed to advertising.

If this counts as an ad/spam - let me know and I'll delete this comment.

My god, we've re-invented the VCR.

It will be a VCR of VCR

Yes it's TiVo for Youtube. And this...THIS...is the real use case for desktop AI: Detecting ads and automatically skipping them.

Funny how the AI barons never mention how AI can empower normies against them.

Same happened to me at a software conference. Ask a bunch of presenters about "When was the last time you put the User before yourself?

Crickets man. Crickets.