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I have to wonder if the computational resource cost of this will outweigh the "lost" ad revenues in the short term at the very least. If it "works" then maybe it can be justified.

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Don't know much about video encoding, but I imagine there are some clever tricks google can pull to embed the ads with keyframes, since when you upload your video to youtube they already do re-encodes. I'm imagining there's some hand wavey stuff that would allow you to sorta concat the ad with different parts of the video.

I'd also imagine that the newer video codecs were explicitly designed to make stuff like this possible without a ton of computational resources.

That sounds about right. I don't know much about video encoding either, but there is software which can losslessly splice videos on key frames. It's also possible to join multiple segments together, as long as all the segments have the same properties (codec, resolution, fps, etc). If this is true, then it would be relatively inexpensive to splice ads into videos like this.

Some comments on the other posts on the topic went over this. Sounds like putting the ad before the keyframe makes it easy enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40658552

If that's true then maybe client side de-splice will be just as easy.

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