- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.
YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it:
ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.
Yes, it is doable. But it also implies keeping track of individual sessions, to make sure you serve the right ad at the right time to the right people. Nothing impossible, but definitely more work to do per individual player, and on the scale of youtube this is quite a lot.