I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
If the ads are unavailable to be skipped through with the progress bar normally, then the computer playing the video necessarily has to be told where they are in some way even if indirectly, because it can skip parts of the regular video but not parts of the ads, so an adblocker client could buffer the video a bit and then play it with those parts removed. Unless they got rid of the ability to skip or fast forward parts of video entirely, or let you do that to ads (in which case you’d probably just manually skip so seems unlikely), but even in that case, if ads are in different parts of the video for different users, then some program could periodically take compressed screenshots or other identifying information about a frame and send them to some shared database, and compare what parts each user has in common, so that a program could cut out sections of the video that don’t fit.
For that matter, something that I’ve wondered about of late with all this AI development is if an AI could be trained to distinguish ads from non-ad content, and used to power some kind of adblocker to cut ads out when they’re integrated seamlessly into a video or stream.
I think they could sidestep that.
If server detects request to move forward past a commercial on the stream, it moves the commercial forward a small random time skip ahead. After a few of those it just disables your accounts ability to ff for a timeout.
I suspect it wouldn’t be all that hard to redesign the system from the ground up to force us into screen recording.
As far as AI detect, probably viable. A lot harder with user generated content. Audio levels change, color grading and composition change. The commercials are of a fairly known length at the moment which would make it easier. They can throw it off by making commercials several seconds or even tens of seconds longer. False positives would definitely be a difficult point on game reviewers and reaction youtubers.