YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

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.

There exists crowdsourced adblocking based on timestamps (SponsorBlock, Tubular). Soon we will have realtime on-device content-aware AI adblocking. They will ever win.

Once we get content-aware AI adblocking, every video and podcast will turn into a product placement.

I use content aware ad blocking to remove inserted and native ads from podcasts. The next level adblocking will be rewriting content that is overly commercial.

Any info on how you do that?

I imagine you can do it by AI-transcribing the podcast while preserving timestamp metadata for each symbol. Use LLM to identify undesirable segments (ask it to output json or something) and then cut them out from the audio with ffmpeg.

Then you would need to set up a server that would do all this and serve as a 'mirror' to your podcasts without the ads.