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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

(iter.ca)
990 points smitop | 3 comments | 20 Jun 25 17:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.742s | source
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ranger_danger ◴[20 Jun 25 17:57 UTC] No.44330199[source]▶
I'm surprised they don't just inject the ads directly into the video stream, I think that would solve their issue overnight (not that I want any ads personally). You could also rate-limit it to the playback speed to prevent pre-downloading the stream easily. But now that everything uses HLS/DASH, it's easy to inject different content right in the middle of the stream without re-encoding anything.
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k12sosse ◴[20 Jun 25 23:13 UTC] No.44332987[source]▶
How does Twitch do it? They're super aggressive and even using third party clients that do a good job and not displaying ads, you still get an occasional "commercial break" screen where they're not serving you the content, or the ad, just a "let's all go to the lobby" screen.
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1. thaumasiotes ◴[21 Jun 25 00:23 UTC] No.44333401[source]▶
Those clients could be doing a better job - when twitch starts playing an ad on the main stream, they also provide a secondary stream that shows the actual content.
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2. plopz ◴[21 Jun 25 03:25 UTC] No.44334229[source]▶
i believe that secondary stream is used for picture in picture so its lower quality, like 480p or something
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3. thaumasiotes ◴[21 Jun 25 03:34 UTC] No.44334264[source]▶
Maybe; I don't know anything about it. I will note that that belief could easily develop, true or not, if twitch streams start out in low resolution and increase as you buffer them.

A third-party client has room to make a dramatic improvement on the twitch experience by not dropping audio while you make the switch from the ad stream to the content stream.