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?
The most significant thing they can do is to force login to watch content, DRM all video, stream the commercials in line as an indistinguishable (to the client) part of the video feed, and stagger the start and stop of each video block randomized to the individual user.
If the client gets absolutely no identification that the stream has changed, and they do a good job with the DRM, It will make it very hard for an individual user to block or skip commercials. People will still be able to screen record entire shows and use commercial skipping technology on it. It might even end up where popular channels end up getting distributed as pirated material through torrent
Realistically though, this is a losing move on their side. The people that are using ads skipping arent about to buy premium, and many if not most are not going to watch ads. They’ll lose what tracking data they get from those people and they’ll lose those people’s engagement boosts and shares. They’ll also introduce a lot of non-paying ad viewers into the pool, making their ads worth even less.
enspezzification
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.
This already happened with YouTube Red exclusive shows and it will happen again