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?)
No you have to switch your vpn to Albania to avoid YouTube ads.
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.
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?
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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
The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it’s a very old approach for adding ads to video streams.
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.
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.
Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.
If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.
RSS feed -> yt-dlp script -> auto queue the folder into the player of your choice. Hmm…
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
(Edit: Though that may not actually work considering this is apparently fully server side. Gonna have to get clever…)
Next step is machine learning to recognize ads and cut them out automatically hah.
Don’t need to go that far, i think. If you had your extension hash some piece of each keyframe (basically: tokenize some IDs for each keyframe) and submit them to a database you could then see which parts were shown to everyone vs only to some people and only display those. Basically similar to how sponsorblock crowd sources its sponsor segment detection but automated. Some people would see the ads but then you’d know what the og video was unless it gets edited.
This is assuming they’re not reencoding the video for each advertisement, which they probably aren’t. If they are it probably gets easier, actually. Sponsorblock could do that.
Oh that’s a smart way of doing it!
YouTube alternatives?
Odysee (they said no to ads recently)
Rumble, Peertube
To follow creators you could try GrayJay https://grayjay.app/
until it stops working, yt-dlp and jellyfin.
Wouldn’t yt-dlp be forced to download the server-side ads, too?
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They used to still be only a small percentage until the entire internet got completely decimated by ads in the past 5 years.
Let’s make an actual useful AI that detects ads and muted/blacks out the screen during ads. Haha
Comskip, it’s not AI, and it works fine.
The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.
Processing isn’t the expensive part. It’s bandwidth. Transferring that much data gets expensive.
And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn’t paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I’ll miss them.
What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?
Storage more likely. Google owns fiber backbones and peers against the tier 1 providers directly. The over all point of ‘no, it’s still prohibitively expensive’ stands unless you’ve got 20B of dark fiber in your pocket.
Bit of A, bit of B?
Right, that’s probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they’re talking about how they’re limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.
Some napkin math:
Youtube has ~7M average concurrent viewers.
https://streamscharts.com/overview?platform=youtube
A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.
Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.
https://www.netnod.se/ix/netnod-ix-pricing
For comparison, Mastodon’s monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.
Super rough calculations, but there’s probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube’s viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.
It’s notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.
But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.
Yes, that’s also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.
Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.
Was my sarcasm not thick enough?
My point was that PeerTube works just fine because BitTorrent is viable.
I caught it, down voters suck at reading lol
I’m getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company’s relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
Hey don’t blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
As in my profits, our losses?
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The network effect is too strong. The minority that are whining here isn’t going to make a dent. Next time you’re out, look at how many people are using ads ridden apps instead of paying $0.99 or whatever to remove them. The users have already decided their time and privacy is worthless and would rather getting the service for “free”.
Reddit is still going strong I feel.
Line go up 💹
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It’s only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
Honestly, I’ve kind of always wondered why they didn’t just do this. It’s always seemed like the obvious thing to me.
I mean, I hope it doesn’t work, because screw Google, but I’m still surprised it took them this long to try it.
Because it’s much more expensive. What they’re talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
This is not necessarily the case.
You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.
The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming
You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.
This isn’t how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the “playlist” (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is “different” from the rest of the chunks.
It wouldn’t cost any CPU with custom software that Google can afford to write. The video is streamed by delivering blocks of data from drives where the data isn’t contiguous. It’s split across multiple drives on multiple servers. Video files are made of key frames and P frames and B in between the key frames. Splicing at key frames need no processing. The video server when sending the next block only needs a change to send blocks based on key frames. It can then inject ads without any CPU overhead.
You’re forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn’t designed to do this
They’re already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.
Wouldn’t it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they’re also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the “skip 10 seconds” button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
It has to know which blocks to chose to get the next part of the file anyway. Except the next part of the file is an ad. So yes there is overhead but not for the video stream server. It doesn’t need to re encode the video. It’s not any more taxing than adding the non skip ads at the beginning that they already do.
Compared to the cost of reencoding the video (or even segments of it) it would be basically nothing, though.
To say that it’s just much more expensive would be a huge understatement. This is not going to work, at least not in a near future…
10% where do you get that. The data I have heard is it’s around a third of all internet users globally.
I also wondered why they didn’t do this, but I think it’s tricky because the ad that gets inserted might need to be selected right at the moment of insertion. That could complicate weaving it into the video itself. But I guess they finally found a way to do it.
I think more and more people are getting really tired of the ads, so it’s starting to affect their revenue a little bit with all the ad blockers.
this has more to do with they got caught lying about their ad numbers and inflated their ad prices. So now they are doing this to show their shareholders they are doing something to protect their revenue and thus keep their stock price inflated.
Yeah, I’ve thought the same. It’s like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
Sponsor Block Addon does it fine.
However I have bigger complains for my Firefox cannot handle most videos anymore. Affected are those with many ads. It starts with a still image and if I don’t quit the video within 10 seconds, my desktop environment crashes, bouncing me back to the login screen. 💩
Did you read the article? The article shows a post from Sponsorblock and it specifically states that they turned off sponsor block submissions on effected browsers since they can’t be reliable with the new ad delivery method
Sorry, but I didn’t feel like opening the link on my phone. 😅🤦
That doesn’t sound like a Firefox issue.
I’ve read about YouTube delaying video play, buffering, and showing a blank screen for X seconds on all videos for non-Chrome browsers.
The desktop crashes don’t sound like YouTube, but I think the rest is the genuine anti-competitive behavior Google has demonstrated. I get these 5-6 second video delays and page refreshes on Firefox and Safari periodically but never in Chrome.
The blog talks about how this changes is also breaking sponsorblock
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
Why would it involve re encoding?
Video encoding works by combining key frames, the whole picture and delta frames, what and how it changed. As long as you swap the stream at a key frame there is no need for a reencoding.
