If YouTube is hosting a video, and then decides to have you watch two 30 seconds ads, and you immediately start watching the original hosted video before 60 seconds has elapsed, why wouldn't a server-side timer work to detect ad blocking? Are we forced to solve this problem client-side with Tom and Jerry Javascript battles?
I don't really understand how video streaming scales, so this is probably a very naive question.
To do what they do affordably, there are tons of caching layers and videos are chunked into smaller opaque chunks of write-once/read-many data which get so widely distributed your head would spin.
The client code is what stitches those blocks together (and figures out what blocks are part of what), figures out what ads should be where, etc.
Any sort of consistent backend state gets very expensive fast, is often a huge bottleneck, and is avoided whenever possible.
Everything from view stats to metadata is usually even done via CRDT type eventually consistent replicated data to avoid all the bottlenecks other approaches would cause.
War of attrition this one is.
Can you do overlays with dynamic ads at scale? I'd think that would be costly.
But content on YouTube is subscription and ad free or with ads. To subvert that is generally labeled piracy.
YouTube does have drop a prop function to a creator which be another way to more directly direct money to creators of content you consume. If you do $5 one out of 1k videos you watch I thik it's fair to skip ads :)