The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it’s a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it’s essentially how regular TV works.
I just hope they don’t start running commercials during the streams like quarter and half screen commercials over top the existing content. A lot of TV channels started doing that when DVRs first popped up.
I suspect that this will be a thing eventually… It’s a reasonably easy way to defeat apps/systems like Comskip that detect and remove ads from videos. Comskip is what Plex, Jellyfin, etc. use to detect ads in DVR recordings.
Those ad removal systems usually find ads by looking for changes in the video. For example, sometimes there’s black frames before and after the ads, sometimes there’s a TV station logo that goes away during ads (especially on channels like CNN), sometimes there’s a change in volume, etc. If they make the ads look similar enough to actual content, it becomes very difficult to automatically remove them. Online platforms like YouTube are trying to achieve the same thing - Make ads “look like” non-ads to make them harder to block.
Comskip has a pretty wide array of detection. They also look at percent scene change,volume , closed captioning, aspect ratios and duration patterns. The sweet part about the duration patterns is we know the contents supposed length. You could analyze the piece of media figure out how long it would be without it and look around for other options that are less obvious but make the right time code.
I’ve been using comskip for years, I suspect if it ends up being the tool we need will have an arsenal of people working on it to tune it for whatever YouTube’s doing.
They’re just looking to knock out the easy methods, they’re not going to try to wage a full-on ground war. Their primary goals are probably to stop ublock and brave, and keep YT-DLP from downloading without ads. secondary goals being to stop or slow down revanced, though I think Google’s going to try to do that for them in security.
I think the next logical step if they can’t block us with reasonable means would be to do some custom encryption in the app. Again not insurmountable but hard to crack out right.
I think using a server to download the whole steam with ads then remove the ads, compress and store the files is really the hardest thing for them to stop.
So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?
Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.
Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.
The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
So YouTube Premium is as worthless as I thought. Google was never great in drawing recognizable lines between their free offering and paid… and it seems their solution is to make everything as shitty as possible and barely fix the stuff they fucked up.
Let’s wait until Google Maps gets ads … routing already seems fishy to me.
Thanks for your brief description… only shows me that my next Phone won’t be a Pixel.
Definitely avoid Pixels. They look better than most Android devices in terms of software imo, although it’s because they’re really locking down the firmware similar to iOS, which breaks the purpose of using Android anyway. Also the processor on the Pixels are even behind 5-6 year old phones.
Btw…Google Maps has ads already, the square icons are all ads paid by the place owners. Routing is fishy yes, because they’re actively routing people through different routes in order to collect data for their algorithms.
The biggest reason I still use Google products is there is no alternative and they fully know this.
I got a Pixel 6 because I wanted to try something new … it will probably be my last Pixel.
If there is a phone out there with Lineage/Cyanogen (or whatever it’s called now) out of the box with decent HW, I would prefer that.
The last 2 years changed Google. They feel hollow like a blimp. Looking big but no real oomph any more.
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There’s a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Agreed, it’s just hard to find a suitable replacement for many things like tvs, since there’s a lack of alternative apps for other platforms on things like roku or LG tvs
It all sounds insane to me because I treat every TV like a computer monitor. Whatever I plug into it is what it displays. I usually ignore the onboard software as much as possible.
That’s exactly what I started doing this year. I’ve read 32 books already and it gives me much more satisfaction than watching stupid “like & subscribe to my patreon” videos.
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
i would consider paying for premium if they broke out the payments properly, i don’t fucking want youtube tv youtube music or whatever other bullshit is attached, just fucking get rid of the ads and charge me like 5 bucks a month and i’ll fuck off.
I remember subscribing to YouTube Red when it first came out (and had a reasonable price), literally the first video I watched after subbing included an ad for YouTube Red in it. I was so fucking pissed lmao, thank goodness for SponsorBlock.
As a YT Premium subscriber I really don’t mind the sponsor sections. Money goes to the creator and a few taps and I’m back to watching. Also, I think outright banning sponsor segments is going to make creators more creative in a bad way…
I totally understand your views, although I’m paying this platform to not show me ads, that money should then go to the creators if they have to insert ads into their videos for some change. This is the platform’s fault.
I mean, it’s very easy money given you already have a channel and a name dor youself. What would YT have to pay creators to not care about such easy money?
Let’s make an actual useful AI that detects ads and muted/blacks out the screen during ads. Haha
I just want the Temu ads to stop
Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don’t know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.
I’m surprised it took them so incredibly long to crack down on adblockers.
They used to still be only a small percentage until the entire internet got completely decimated by ads in the past 5 years.
So AdGuard works on the YouTube website. I haven’t been there for some time - I use 2 other methods to watch YouTube ad-free.
- Newpipe - Android app that works by parsing the website, will probably be affected?
- YouTube Kodi add-on - works with Google YouTube API, I was wondering when this loophole is going to be plugged…
Anyone with knowledge of the matter care to comment? So far my YouTube watching is still ad-free.
I also run pi-hole in front of my WiFi. Nothing gets through. Or will it?
I noticed some podcasts these days have random server injected ads - usually the same ad repeated 2 or 3 times, is this going to be my video stream soon?
If ads are injected server-side like the article is taking about, your downloads in Newpipe and Kodi are going to have the ads in them.
use ublock origin, so far it’s been pretty much problem free.
Outside of this, use something like yt-dlp to run your own jellyfin instance or something.
Nothing gets through. Or will it?
You would have to block the video itself to get rid of them
Pihole will not work because it works on the DNS queries. With server side injection it’s gonna be tougher to block ads, but I’m sure we’ll find a way
YouTube alternatives?
until it stops working, yt-dlp and jellyfin.
Wouldn’t yt-dlp be forced to download the server-side ads, too?
hence the until it stops working, but even then it will likely get worked around for the most part.
There is software for commercial detection and removal from static MP4. That’s not a hard problem to solve.
Odysee (they said no to ads recently)
Rumble, Peertube
To follow creators you could try GrayJay https://grayjay.app/
When Twitch this I rented a VPS in Russia that costs me $3 a month. I now route all my traffic through it and have no ads in Twitch (and im assuming YT too now?)
I’m really curious if they can make video injection of ads cost effective.
It feels like mangeling video streams into one, potentially re-encoding the video as they go… sounds expensive
There was a brief point in YouTube’s history where there were little-to-no ads, and creators weren’t expecting to make a living off the videos they made. Somewhere down the line, it feels like the wrong turn was taken from a content consumers perspective.
Yes, hosting is expensive between the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements, but there already was a model in traditional web hosting where the hosting provider charges for the hosting infrastructure, as well as storage and bandwidth costs. While we’re all so accustomed to accessing sites for free and fast, I think that there should’ve been a “free” tier for uploads which could’ve been kept at 10 mins or w/e and rate limited, while offering paid tiers for longer, higher quality/fidelity content , and larger bandwidth buckets before rate limiting which could help offset YTs costs, as well as temper expectations of what it means to create and watch.
Heck, there could even be a paid tier for viewers that could even allow viewers to watch “free” uploads without being limited, and the viewer would be supporting as well.
Yes, that means that large scale, Mr. Beast style productions would be a lot less feasible, but I feel like it’s not just the platform that being enshittified, but also the amount of aspiring creators who’ve also come out of the woodwork copying or re-uploading other creators content in hopes of getting blessed by the algorithm for a free payout.
I know these are 2 separate issues, and the ship has sailed long ago, but I can’t help but feel like this whole business model is being done wrong from a sustainability perspective.
reply to me with youtube URLs videos, channels or playlists that you find interesting.
optionally specify these tags so I can organize the data better
- it’s video component is nesisary (VIDEO)
- it’s video component is summerised by a single image (STILL)
- it’s mostly talking (COMMENTARY)
- it’s a person talking into a camera (FACE)
- it’s music (MUSIC)
- it’s a square thumbnail or video (SQUARE)
- Its a 4 by 3 thumbnail or video (4BY3)
- high resolution video (HIRES)
Ive been archiving for years and this looks like it may be the final clean batch I can produce. Feel free to specify other tags that may be useful and I will add them.
deleted by creator
So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they’re finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?
No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren’t you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google’s monopoly! /s
i think people may have missed that you’re not serious
The problem with pretending to be a dumbass on the Internet, is it’s almost impossible to outdo the professionals.
Reading comprehension is for people who paid attention in school. Nerds.
Poe’s law
It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.
The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.
Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.
So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.
Well… Communism is directly responsible for multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions. Then there are the inevitable purges that have taken millions of lives and hosts of terrors as well.
You’re free to dispute history if you need to, and claim that theoretically communism is nice, but in practice, history tells us that living under communism reaaaalllyy sucks.
There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine ‘only’ killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.
Are you paraphrasing that ‘Black Book of Communism’ shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ‘‘mass killing caused by communism’’, including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as ‘killed by communism’).
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.
why would this be relevant? The US had a higher per capita GDP than the USSR and it was capitalist, surely that means that capitalism would be better here?
that’s like saying capitalism is directly responsible for school shootings because it happens all the time in the US. but no one’s dumb enough to claim that because that’s not how things work.
well, technically the USSR exported lots and lots of grain during the 30s famine. So.
It’s still not perfect, but you could argue there was mismanagement there.
TBF, stalinism wasn’t really communism, it was more authoritarianism than anything, but.
This kind of messages should have a “/s” attached. IMHO, that’s just proper Netiquette.
I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn’t universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn’t infer if it wasn’t explicit.
Netiquette
Now there’s a term I’ve not seen in many years.
And dates both of us, I expect… 😄
This is a good question.
Great, now it’s Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. <clickPause> ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it’s tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
In the past they have always said that they aren’t transmitting the content and so it’s the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I’m curious if that’s enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove “objectionable” content.
legally that’s the same as far as courts care.
The only thing that would change this is a ruling on advertiser responsibility. Or something tangentially related that would force them to properly regulate ads for example.
Ultimately i’m guessing unless youtube rolls their own in home ads, instead of allowing other advertising agencies to run their ads on youtube, it simply wouldn’t apply here.
No, at least not in the USA. They’re still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.
now serving up the ads directly to me
What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
Does anybody know how this will affect the EU?
