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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

(iter.ca)
990 points smitop | 1 comments | 20 Jun 25 17:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | 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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peer2pay ◴[20 Jun 25 23:37 UTC] No.44333133[source]▶
It has to be a cost thing. HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

I’m not too deep into it anymore but there’s some great articles from Netflix out there talking about the crazy optimisations done to their edge servers for streaming.

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1. cyberax ◴[21 Jun 25 02:10 UTC] No.44333902[source]▶
> HLS is so insanely optimised down to the hardware level that adding any kind of compute for targeting would increase costs exponentially.

Not really. They'll just need to recode for you that one minute with the ad. The rest of the video can stay the same.

If they're doing it smartly, they can even avoid full recompression and just splice in the ad.