What took them so long?
Anyway. I’m sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
Adapt to what?
If they’re mixing the content with the ads server side, it’s going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn’t it? Where it’s all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we’ll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
If they’re predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they’re not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you’d need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
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Honestly, I’d be happy to take the job and sabotage them from the inside.
We could use audio fingerprinting to detect ads in the buffer
Yeah that could work… What about creating some sort of *arr for YouTube videos that downloads them and processes them with some sort of AI audio/video processing to remove the ads and recombine the video.
Youtubarr it could be called. If we really want we can also remove the ads from the creator in the video too. It would still count as a view to the video too so creator won’t lose out on money.
Anyone with objections to this?
It’s a neat idea, but computer vision stuff can get quite computationally expensive when done locally and is prone to input poisoning attacks (especially if the models used are open source).
Not saying it wouldn’t be possible, but I think some of the other ideas posed here would be better starting places.
Or get the video once with a YouTube premium account and cut out anything that doesn’t match from the free version.
There’s no such thing as “download the video”. It’s a stream of small chunks, which can be re-arranged by back-end in any way, shape and form.
Oh, the diffing thing is clever!
I think it’s more like extracting raisins? ad contents are still separate from the dough. finding the boundary conditions or ads hashes is guaranteed to work. whether it is feasible for adblockers is a different matter yet.
Not really. Because there are no boundary conditions. Videos are not streamed as a one big file, they’re streamed as small chucks, like 5-10 seconds short chunks. Replace one chunk content randomly on the back-end with an ad and no ad blocker will be able to spot it.
the lengths required to defeat youtube automatic copyright detection even for short segments of videos suggests that it can be done. if it can be done with the resources of consumer devices that’s the question.
Their copyright detection doesn’t work in real time on consumer browsers during video playback.
Not comparing feasibility though? Only the flour/bread analogy. Injected ads however it is done will always not be a part of the original video.
Even if adblockers aren’t able to remove the ads, I’m sure they can still make it so you can skip over them with the arrow keys or video timeline.
That’s why I said “What took them so long?”
Adapt to what?
I don’t know, man. I hope they succeed. If they don’t, then I will never visit YouTube again.
Some other frontend that would allow me to fast-forward them would be fine, though.
It’s not that simple. Right now it’s still separate video streams but presented as if they were the actual video, put in a queue of sorts.
Ublock Origin released a script to block them yesterday btw
Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn’t. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.
I’ve never understood why they haven’t just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it’s harder to target them client side.
The value that Google has always provided as an ad platform is that they’re targeted ads. You can target estimated age, geographic location, gender, estimated income. You can target your ads so narrowly that only a single person ever gets them even.
To bake ads into the actual content stream they have to expend compute editing and re-rendering the video for as many times as they have ads that they intend to run on those videos. They can do it once with once batch of ads but then it’s only as targeted as who clicks on that video. Realistically they’ll want to do it 5x, 10x or more per video (and store every copie of the video, unless there’s some tech to store it as segments and seamlessly stitch then together as a single stream) to continue targeting the ads which gets very expensive fast
Ya I’m actually surprised they hadn’t done that sooner.
You need to kill the market first, if you make ad riddled shit first, no one uses your system. Now there is no real competition, which means they will monetize their position. It is what corporations do. We need alternatives, and I know Fediverse has some.
They absolutely will. There are far more people (and probably smarter people to boot) working on blocking their shit than there are people at Google working on making it unblockable.
This is an arms race where they will win the occasional battle, but always lose the war.
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Careful - if we ever detect evasion, that’s a lifetime IP ban.
And lose out on any potential future profits? Probably not. Especially if the IP is dynamic.
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It’s technically complicated, and requires more compute to do it server side.
I didn’t say it would be easy. But yup.
It doesn’t require any compute on the server at all.
What possible response is there from adblockers to this?
Index the content of the ads, identify it, and drop that data from the served video file? There may be a more clever solution, but that’d definitely work. It should be possible to checksum or just straight up store the data for the first couple of kilobytes of video data that would uniquely identify each ad.
Youtube obviously must have a rota of however many ads which they can display, so eventually they’d all get identified although you’d be playing whack-a-mole forever as they release new ones. Isn’t Sponsorblock partially crowdsourced anyway?
This would be challenging and fairly expensive, but worth it if you were motivated by sufficient spite.
They say the ad is being integrated straight into the video stream on the server side though. It won’t be its own identifiable piece of data on the client side anymore.
Yes it will? The video stream is handed from the server to your browser or device. Once it arrives, your machine can do whatever it likes with it. Up to and including deliberately ignoring part of the data, and since Youtube videos are buffered your client can skip to whatever part of the video is past the ad provided it’s been buffered that far.
But how? Unless I’m misunderstanding how video encoding is done, you shouldn’t be able to reliably identify what’s an ad vs what’s actual video once it starts getting mixed together. The ad will be encoded differently for every video it’s inserted into.
I could be completely wrong about this, but the same ad clip’s data should end up looking completely different depending on any number of things.
Most encoding formats are deterministic, including the VP8/VP9 codec that Youtube uses. I imagine they could deliberately insert some manner of randomization in there if they really wanted to, and if they intend to carry through with this plan they may have to. But the same input with the same encoder (and settings) should produce the same output every time, at least if you begin counting from a keyframe.
Even if it can’t be identified on a binary level with clever tactics, which I think it will be unless they do some kind of picture-in-picture thing, it should be trivial with current hardware identify it even with a fairly crude optical recognition system and a database. I.e., sample N number of points on the output and gauge the average RGB data for each for a couple of frames, and if that matches our entry for the ad in our crowdsourced database, skip ahead X seconds based on the database. Even better if you did it on the keyframes.
Doing it based off of the audio of the ad should be even easier, since acoustic fingerprinting is a pretty cheap technology to implement these days.
The other question will be if Youtube is dumb enough to always insert the same type of ads in the same place in each video, which they may be at least to start with, so a very simple table of “skip X amount of time at Y timecode on Z video” would be feasible. Or even better, if they hard insert the ads into the video to save on processing time, such that they never change. Are they going to try to insert ads and encode video to serve to individual users in realtime? Doubt it. That’d be bonkers. Youtube already chews on uploaded videos for sometimes upwards of an hour before having them ready to serve… I don’t think they’re ready to commit to and pay for the compute power to try to pull a stunt like this in realtime.
All of this is going to require some manner of crowdsourcing, unless we get really good at using AI against them or something (which’d be immensely satisfying, come to think of it).
If a song can ne fingerprinted (e.g. Shazam), so can ads. Even when they’re part of a larger video.
Twitch does the same thing but you can still circumvent it. Worst case users may need a VPN to a country that doesn’t have many ads.
What part of the data?
The whole point of this is they want to meld the ad data with the content in such a way that there are no identifiers anymore.
If what you’re suggesting were possible, they wouldn’t be bothering with this.
Define “meld.”
If they’re encoding the ads and the content into the same video stream, which appears to be the proposal, your client still has access to the entire video stream and in fact must do so in order to play it.
Even if you’re not going to be able to identify an ad on the raw binary level, and my proposal to do that was just spitballing anyway, the world is just absolutely chock-a-block full of audio and video content identification technologies that could be co-opted to identify specific ads, at which point your client could simply not play the section of the video stream containing them.
If what you’re suggesting were possible, they wouldn’t be bothering with this.
You’re giving Google waaaay too much credit.
They tried other methods prior to this, and failed. So they thought those methods were effective, and they totally bothered implementing them.
Except with AI what’s to stop the advertisers from dynamically generating ads on the fly that are just ever so different from the original so as to throw off this kind of blocking.
Probably nothing, so don’t give them any ideas.
This is not feasible.
Explain.
Don’t ads need to be legally highlighted as being ads in many countries?
Would make detection easy.
Do you really want your ad blocker to do a resource intense image detection over a video stream in real time? Your PC will start fucking fuming.
Better than watching an ad.
Would love to see AI ad recognition thrown back in their faces.
Perhaps the ads could be fingerprinted the same way Shazam fingerprints songs
This is exactly what will happen.
Diff the same video a few times and you’ll be able to figure out which is injected content and which isn’t.
Separate out the injected content and you can fingerprint that content like how Plex or Emby fingerprints intros to TV shows (i.e. it’s a solved and known problem).
Then you can reliably identify the injected and content, you know how long it is and can just tell the client to skip it.
This won’t be easy, it’ll require more than folks indexing ad content but it’s feasible.
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How does sponsorblock does it, then?
Users can mark videos and submit that content. Users can vote on other users’ marking of content. It won’t work if YT streams the ads in if they randomly change the timestamp at which the ad(s) start.
Yup! Oh, I know how sponsorblock does it, but the question was more about highlighting that it’s theoretically possible. Unless they do what you describe.
Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I’ll be choosing that over watching ads.
If they do it properly, you won’t be able to do it.
There will always be a way
Can you skip ads on live TV? No.
With a DVR? Yes.
When ads are a distinct bit of content recognized by the client, then the casual user with the stock client/no add-ons can’t overcome the UI choice to block you from seeking unless youtube lets you. But this allows ad blockers to skip even downloading the ad, because it’s clear what is content and what is ad.
If the ad is completely “just part of the stream” with zero indication where ads begin and end, then you can at least seek back and forth, with not even the official client able to block you from seeking, because it doesn’t know where the ads are either. The client downloads the stream.
If the stream is accompanied by some metadata letting the client know when to block seeking, then ad blockers can use that to auto-seek.
I suspect the last one is going to be the case, because they both want to limit seeking during ad, and they also want to change things to an ad experience so that you ‘click through’ to what the ad is trying to get you to do.
You can fast forward on yt though :p, so unless they remove that for the duration of the ad (in which case an addon could possibly use that to determine if an ad is being played) you could at least skip it manually. And maybe there’d be a crowd sourced solution to somehow determine the actual videos beginning (like detecting the first frame of the actual video or something, idk).
What’s to stop them from timestamping the time they sent you the ad and wait until like 90% of that time has gone by until they send you the video? It’s all server-side, nothing a plugin can do.
Plugins could have lengthy buffers and a start-up delay, not ideal obviously, but some people and for some videos, people might be willing to wait. Alternatively as many others have mentioned in this post, a plugin could mute the audio and/or black out the video if it detects an ad playing. There are trade offs, but it’s a workable approach as well.
Honestly that’s not much better than muting and doing something else like we used to do with cable. If it gets to this point, I’ll be long gone, probably to curiositystream or nebula.
Image Recognition could attatch the first frame of an ad to the length of time the ad plays for, then add it to an online DB a la sponserblock.
They might try to block seeking during these sections, but YouTube usually has raw mp4 streams available under the hood. You can even pull them using invidious or newpipe. Take that out and we might be fucked.
A good way to block this kind of thing is just to use DRM. Most platforms now provide a completely blocked off and secure hardware DRM solution that makes it impossible to grab video frames or view decrypted data in any way from the host operating system or any app running on it.
Ripping the video segments would just give you encrypted and useless data without the license.
These kinds of systems would need to be attacked by HDMI or other downstream hacks, or an HD video camera pointed at the screen in a dark room :)
Its bad enough they use widevine on their free movies/shows but the idea of them requiring widevine for regular YouTube sounds awful.
Hopefully legacy clients/devices will stave that off until something else comes along.
Actually, they might “win” the ad block arms race with drm. Shit. It’s the atomic option
Show me the image recognition API in the browser docs :)
I don’t know youd be able to do it within a browser extension but something like newpipe or yt-dlp?
Public Invidious Instances would be tough because that’s a lot of load to stick on a server, especially one run by a hobbiest. But self-hosted single/low user instances could also feasibly do this.
Obviously its gonna take a good bit of work, but it IS doable.
Train an AI to detect ads and voila
Product review video, blocked. Product is mentioned in a video, blocked. Product is shown too long, blocked.
“AI” isn’t smart enough to do it and it would require your computer to be powerful enough to not convert videos to PowerPoints.
Product review video, blocked. Product is mentioned in a video, blocked. Product is shown too long, blocked.
Sounds like a win-win situation. 🤷♂️
Lmao
It’s fairly easy to block any user access to video buffers using DRM
I am 100% fine with letting it play realtime in the background, having a plugin record that like ye olde VCR, and then skipping adds manually.
You typically can’t record DRM content, you might be able to crack HDMI security and record that way.
Hardware DRM doesn’t expose decrypted video data to anything in the host operating system
In the extremely rare event that I watch a youtube video on a my phone, and an ad comes on, I mute sound and literally turn my head away. Advertisers can’t do shit about that lol.
I’ve done something similar by mixing two extensions together in times where unlock origin wasn’t keeping up with YT changes (ad muting extension plus auto skip extension). It worked really well for when you had the video in the background of a game or work, and if I were solely watching the video it was just a trigger for a phone break during the video
I wouldn’t even mind the ads if they just played maybe one per three or four videos. That would still bring in a massive amount of money without pissing everyone off.
Instead we get up to two ads every couple of minutes.It’s all about blatant greed.
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Two ads before the video starts, which was a movie trailer.
“To watch this ad you first must watch two ads!”
If it wasn’t the same 3 ads over and over too
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).
If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn’t trying to do anything remotely like that.
This specific example is one thing that self hosting is arguably better for. I’ve made a few shitposting memes and the like that are five seconds long and uploaded unlisted just to share with friends that get immediately flagged and banned for DMCA that I’ve taken to just self hosting them. They’re getting like three views anyway because the world was never meant to see them.
People sharing videos with friends and family seems like a problem that’s already solved, if you really don’t want to use YouTube. Big channels that get millions of views are the real issue.
It’s not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
- Resolution
- Frame rate
- Quality
- Bit rate (file size)
- Encoding complexity
- Decoding complexity (which affects battery life of mobile devices viewing the content)
- Robustness for dropped or corrupted data
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that’s 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that’s 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they’re ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid’s birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it’s on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn’t scale, it won’t be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
Or that’s what we’re led to believe. Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives. We need an open source alternative to YouTube, and perhaps with some innovation that may be possible. You don’t need storage, for example, if content is just streamed in a p2p manner, even with a time delay so people can watch something whenever
Edit: some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV
For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
Your equating the software development with the running costs.
People have made OS and people have made YouTube alternatives. But that’s nothing compared to the quantity of servers, networking infrastructure, storage, power usage, and labor to maintain and update it.
P2p isn’t a valid alternative because that’s just shifting costs onto your users. Just because a central entity isn’t taking on the burden of cost doesn’t mean the cost isn’t there.
Pictures and text are rather low usage, both in storage and networking but video isn’t. Especially when millions are watching videos at the same time.
What you’re saying is valid in a model where the server hosts content and provides it on demand, and that’s not what I was describing.
Here’s the model I had in my head, but I am not sure if anyone has attempted this yet:
1…user uploads a video which borrows resources from p2p network
2…the shared burden is shifted around as nodes become active or inactive
3…content is always available in asynchronous, on demand fashion
I don’t work in distributed and networked systems, so I don’t expect the above model to strictly be based in reality, but it’s not that fanciful based on the wiki article I shared
I guess it’s a fair point that users maybe don’t want to be responsible for the burden. In which case, I guess why complain about ads then 🤷♀️
You are kinda describing “maidsafe”
But maidsafe isn’t fully free, you technically pay access by sharing/lending hardware to the network
Cool, so I don’t understand why it has to be fully free. I think people should be comfortable taking control of their technologies otherwise they should be okay with getting what they get from the service providers
I totally agree with you, I’m happy to pay when the service is good. I was only mentioning it wasn’t fully free because I know some care about that.
You’re right that this is possible. But the speed and quality are going to decline considerably under this model, particularly across distant regions.
In which case, I guess why complain about ads then
Because the average internet user (and many FOSS users, sadly) have gotten into the mindset that they deserve everything for free, the way they want it.
(For those taking offense to the bit about freeloading FOSS users, I refer you to the FOSS dev burnout trend we were discussing a month ago)
Maybe if we would stop expecting these sites to provide wasteful ultra-huge megaHD videos, it wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, even with YouTube, maybe if they just served DVD-quality videos they wouldn’t need to push tons of ads on us in the first place. Our expectation for this crazy new pointless ultra-sharp quality videos is ridiculous and is part of the problem with content delivery these days.
For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
Fuck you.
Are you mad about something else? It’s okay, use your words
We can barely keep Mastodon / Lemmy instnaces floating that host text, gifs and pictures.
That doesn’t include paying the content creators.
Just because you’re getting shit for free, doesn’t mean that other people will want to do it for you for free.
Fuck you.
lol assuming way too much about me, feel free think what you want 😂
peertube exists. so does owncast
Neither pay their creators as far as I’m aware?
so? find someone to pay you.
Hmm. Maybe youtube?
don’t count on it.
Not downvoting, but I just think you’re way too optimistic. It’s like believing we, humans, could stop fighting wars. Sure, theoretically. But the difference between theory and the practical is that in theory there’s no difference.
Hmm not being optimistic, just going based on past experience. Look at where you’re posting right now, did anyone think the fediverse could be a possibility when we have twitter, fb or reddit? There’s nothing out of the norm about what I am saying anyways, people do stuff like this for sport or based on ideology. That’s why anyone should support a foss project they use or admire, or pay artists, writers, niche magazines etc
It’s just YouTube shills. Content creators who want to make money on the platform, and content viewers who don’t want to have to check multiple places for the things they watch.
No one should feel bad for Google though, as they chose YouTube to be open to anyone uploading anything.
Content creators who want to make money on the platform
You mean “get paid for labour”? How fucking dare they ask money for their time and providing people with information / entertainment / whatever.
you can make money off-platform from your content. you don’t need to be paid by youtube.
Idealistic view based on a miniscule amount of very talented/devoted people.
Yawn. This was not my point, or even what I was trying to to say.
But I wonder how much you’ll defend YouTube and Google in 2 years.
Of course it wasn’t…
No defending here. Just making fun of all the entitled delusional crybabies here.
peertube uses webtorrents. it’s viable. it works. owncast is fully self-hosted. it works. all the people downvoting are repeating a talking point, and have never implemented these projects.
They have a point about server costs and maintenance, which is why I suggested community garden type server farms.
I also didn’t need to call people idiots, but we’re all humans sigh
Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives.
An OS requires significantly less resources. The only online features you need for an OS is a website to market the OS and host ISO’s. Then you need a server to distribute packages to users. Packages which are significantly smaller then HD or 4K videos
Considering I remember some project in the past tried something like that in the past and found that because you can’t control when people log off you can’t guarantee files will transfer in one piece not to mention how expensive it was having everyone’s computer constantly using Internet and computing stuff. For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site. I suppose as a step in the right direction I propose that we get people to make online data bases using laptops/desktops that have nothing but xzamp and the videos you wish to upload to the web. Then we all collectively promote a sort of aggregation site that promotes everyones videos that way the aggregation site only has to store a bunch of hyperlinks and handle all the traffic while you the content creator just have to handle the traffic your content generates now the only challenge is making this idea profitable because if content creators can’t profit few if any will make content and if the aggregation platform can’t break eaven then we are back to square one of no one knowing where to look for content.
For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site.
Basically old web but with aggregators, I don’t hate it. I think there needs to be a way to alleviate burden from content creators in a way. Tbh, maybe we need community server farms which are jointly supported, like community gardens in a way
Old web was awesome. Audiences were smaller, but content was far more personalized and less corporate. I could see link aggregators and relay networks coming back and people self-hosting more of their own content in the future, but it would have to take a massive shift in consumer behavior to wean themselves off of the teat of Web 2.0 spoon-feeding them their content and making content creating/sharing as frictionless as possible.
a) I downvoted you b) I am a YouTube shill c) Fuck you
that means I get money from them, right? I’m still waiting for my check. YouTube is the best.
It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running.
Indeed. Yet they still add stupid features like 8K video and high-bitrate 1080p. What the heck are they doing? Who needs more then 720p anyways?
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I’ll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That’s only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I’ll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
How about people just host videos on their own infrastructure or rented VPS? Honestly the idea that creators should get paid by YouTube/Twitch/etc confuses me. Those services if anything should be charging creators money as they are providing them computing resources.
All this enshittification might be good for me. I think i might start reading more books instead of watching youtube. Fuck you google, I’ll never buy yt premium nor watch you ads.
Yeah that’s what I did when reddit shit the bed. I’m spending the free time with books and getting back into gaming. It’s an improvement really.
I can’t point to any one hobby that truly picked up my reddit time, but I do feel like everything I’m doing in its place is more productive
They’ll put ads in books too.
You do know physical books exist, dont you? :) I did not say ebook.
They have physical books that supplement the printing costs with ads.
Libraries still exist for now. Take advantage of them and maybe they won’t all get shut down.
library books are still physical books that sometimes have ads in them to supplement thecost of printing. they don’t get conjured up by librarian mages.
insert gif here
Be a lot cooler if they did
Those aren’t super intrusive. It’s not a loud ad that has to load, yell at you and slows down getting to the content I question, and printed ads in books don’t disrupt a music listening session by playing shitty ad music between songs as you’re getting a specific mood on. Print ads don’t bug me the way web and video ads do
Many physical books have ads in the beginning and end. I would dare to say all. At the very least, a small “banner” ad for the publisher on one page.
Do you have to watch it for 30 seconds before you’re allowed to turn the page? Does it pop up every 5 pages and can’t be skipped?
Lol sorry, are advertisements that aren’t intrusive not considered advertisements to you??? Maybe that mindset is why the internet is unusable without an ad blocker…
I still think you dont know the difference between a magazine and a book, and that scares me tbh.
Genuinely asking, why won’t you ever buy yt premium?
Not OP, but I would definitely pay for premium if they offered a lower cost version that was only ad-free YouTube. But I won’t pay when they justify the higher cost with forced bundling of other services I am not interested in and have no use for, e.g., YouTube Music.
$13.99/mo is pretty steep, and realistically I’d have to get it for my wife too which effectively doubles the price and would make it the most expensive streaming service I’ve ever subscribed to (behind SeriusXM which at least has to finance literal satellites in space and delivers me radio when I’m in dead zones with no cell towers). More than my budget right now will allow for sure (I just cancelled every subscription after rechecking my budget)
If they do that and Adblock doesn’t work anymore, the solution is quite simple - stop watching YouTube. Sure, there will be some content creators that I will miss. Maybe it will be time to move to Nebula.
Nebula is paid, you can also pay YouTube and remove ads.
Nebula is cheaper but it also has a very small fraction of the content that YouTube has. So I really don’t see why moving to another paid service with less content is a solution for anyone.
Nebula has most of the content creators I would pay money to support, and more of that money would be going back to them.
Nebula has a small fraction of creators. Admittedly a lot of good ones, but not all, or even most. It’s just not a solution for most people.
Nebula is only cheaper if your currency is the USD
Also very true, not just USD though. CAD, GBP, AUD as well as others. But yeah in many countries YouTube has market pricing whereas Nebula doesn’t.
Similar reason as people moving from Spotify to Tidal. The creators get paid more per view on Nebula than on YouTube.
Besides, I imagine there’s quite an overlap of people that watch the type of content that goes up on Nebula and the people that are willing to pay for the content.
Nebula isn’t supported by ads AFAIK though
Neither is YouTube if you pay them. It just strikes me as odd to say “Fuck YouTube for pushing all these ads, I’m switching to Nebula” when Nebula is paid and the only reason they are getting ads on YouTube is because they refuse to pay.
It’s essentially punishing YouTube for having an ad-supported option at all.
Nebula is built and run by content creators, whereas YouTube is operated by a shitty Big Tech corporation that solely wants to extract money and user data
It’s about incentives. Alphabet is in the biz of serving advertisers. That’s their paying customer. This is baked into their entire ecosystem of products and services. It’s who they are. It shows in everything they do.
If ad block breaks I no longer consider YouTube videos to be content. They’re just ads.
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PeerTube. Except nobody’s going to use it until everybody uses it.
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Load it to what? Who’s going to pay for all the bandwidth and storage. How much are y8u willing to host? Peertube is never going to take off because it well cost users and people like free.
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That’d require a bit more knowledge than the average YouTube user has, unfortunately.
Who’s going to pay for all the bandwidth and storage.
The users – it’s all bittorrent.
Just add “decentralized web3 mining” somewhere in the page and crypto-dipshits will host the shit out of it. No actual cryptocurrency nor even a whitepaper required.
You’re right, but I dream that one day enough people will realise that the “free” model is shit and be willing to pay.
I’d love to support a content producer on peertube who hosts their own content - the proviso being that their content is engaging enough to want to watch.
Kind of bootstrap paradox
It’s called network effect
I just went and looked to see if peertube is remotely viable… technically seems working. I found an app on f-droid, got on a bigger instance (1k users seems about the biggest). Videos load and play. There isn’t much content at all. A real shame. So yeah we don’t have an option
Other than using Patreon or something on the side, I don’t see how anyone is going to make money off of creating Peertube content, either. Becoming a millionaire Youtube star à la Mr. Beast or Linus or whoever the fuck is obviously every aspiring videographer’s goal on there, whether it actually happens or not, and that inherent commercialization draws creators to the platform regardless of whether or not we think it’s for good or for ill.
Peertube, if it ever takes off, will probably be like early Youtube in that the people posting to it will be enthusiasts who want to, not personalities doing it in the hopes of getting rich. That might be a good thing, depending on how you look at it, but don’t ever expect the kinds of ultra-produced, professional content we see on Youtube these days coming from people who can afford to hire camera teams, video editors, sound people, scriptwriters, on-location shoots, etc., etc.
I upload my videos there. Started off because professor wanted us to record ourselves then I just uploaded whatever. It’s not much but it’s honest work.
PeerTube doesn’t have the allure given by the chance of getting paid for what you upload
you can still get paid but you’ll need to make your own revenue stream.
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…PeerTube!
This is where we need to start harnessing AI for our advantage rather than corporations. Have it scan the videos as it buffers and automatically remove the ads.
This seems like it ought to be possible? Seems that way to me as a lay person anyway.
comskip.exe does it well on free to air TV, but I suspect the methods it uses might not work so well for Sponsorblock etc. That said, maybe a hash can be made of the video every ten seconds, and when the playback hash differs, skip that ten second block. Computationally intensive I suspect, but might work for embedded ads.
Only works if google inserts ads without re-encoding the video. I think that’s possible, as long as you only cut only keyframes of the video (shutter encoder has a feature to cut without re-encoding, and it warns of this limitation)
And then Google sues the AI provider to stop them from doing that.
AI is not our tool, it is a corporate tool, for corporate profits, that they deign to let us dabble with, but only when it suits them.
There are plenty of open source ai, especially these single purpose one.
You could probably train something like that on semi-reasonable consumer hardware. Ads often have a very distinctive style and tone, and you need only a single output - the probability of it being any given second being an ad. It would probably take a lot to run though, you better hope the people who install the extension have good PCs. And, it would probably never get 100% accurate, you’d have to put up with still seeing some ads and having to rewind when it skips over valid video.
It’s usually even easier than that… In my jurisdiction, ads have to be clearly labeled and identified. It should be relatively trivial to detect this label.
it might even be ridiculously simple given that ads almost 100% of the time have louder audio than the content by design.
it hurts so much that it is VERY hard to replicate youtube given the insane upkeep costs. I would leave in a fucking heartbeat but so many good creators only post there
Yeah, I keep hearing that Youtube has probably never made a net profit.
Not because they couldn’t but because they willfully operated at a loss to quench potential competition. The reason there is no replacement on YT is that all the content is on YT and creators won’t shift to other platforms because their whole audience is on YT as well.
YT is not a video sharing platform anymore, it’s a market. And that’s why it sucks so bad.
There’s no way to know, Google doesn’t report YouTube profit separately in their financial statements. The closest department is “Google services” which does have a 34% profit margin.
And this will be more expensive to implement than regular ads, thus margins will be even thinner…
it’s hard to replicate, has high upkeep, big authors’ community. it seems YouTube deserves to be paid despite all the negativity towards it.
I could sit here and throw out all the bad shit YouTube’s done but quite honestly the fact that its owned by google is enough justification to not give them money lmao.
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I’ve decided I’m going to do freelance ads for free for exposure on a comment by comment basis while I drink this refreshing iced cold Coca Cola.
When I see an ad on the internet, I purposefully look away to not look at it.
It is deeply ingrained in my brain to never let ads win.
I don’t know how my parents are doing it with cable TV.
It was about time, was always strange that Twitch did it first, and just like over there I’m hopeful some clever people will still make scripts capable of blocking ads.
there’s scripts to block twitch ads?
and nobody told me???
Mostly just hide video and mute audio until it’s over. Alternate player for twitch is the name of the extension.
https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
The TTV LOL pro app works but it can be spotty sometimes.
TTV LOL pro is ran on public proxies, if u run the proxies yourself then you will have 0 issues.
I use video swap new from the GitHub the other commenter posted.
Oh well.
This sucks but they need to keep turning up the dial so more people jump over to peertube.
is there a way to experience peertube that comes even close to youtube? i took a look at some instances and they’re always like here’s a page that looks like it was made in 1993 and only had videos of one dude.
Not that I’ve really found.
It’s like lemmy before may last year - just weird
there are alternative apps to access peer tube instances, like for lemmy. even newpipe has support for one of the bigger ones
As much as I want something like that to happen I don’t see it happening for video platforms. Since most people wouldn’t switch platforms from YouTube since the creators they like are on YouTube and those creators won’t switch platforms cause they won’t be able to make a living on another platform unless it’s another big one like TikTok. The only alternatives to YouTube that have really worked are more niche subscription platforms like Nebula and Floatplane. Which only work as an additional platform to YouTube as a way to get some extra stable income that isn’t ad dependent.
I agree in that its probably not the right time in 2024.
I also don’t think bittorrent is the right tech.
That said, as yt becomes more toxic there’s more demand for alternatives.
The most realistic solution is probably eventually breaking up Youtube on grounds it’s a monopoly. The political will doesn’t exist atm, but that would solve the problem of YT having no competitors and would mean competitors would come with infrastructure already.
I don’t see this as very realistic because, as you say, there’s no political will.
Creation of a derivative work without author’s consent solely for the purpose of monetisation - sounds legally dubious to me as you couldn’t claim fair use.
You think Google didn’t already think of that? From Youtube’s ToS:
Right to Monetize
You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.
Displaying ads on or within - definitely
Modifying content and distributing the modified content? That’s a trickier one.
It really isn’t
Nice thought, but precedence has been around 80 plus years with TV ads…
:(
Not technically true - the movie reel itself wasn’t altered.
It was swapped out for ads, and the same is true for digital formats. Here, they’d be actively modifying and distributing a modified file.
TV companies actively edit parts of the movie out constantly.
Yes they do, they skip parts definitely.
From the average viewer’s perspective, it hasn’t changed from before, unless you’re using an adblocker. And as youtube wasn’t sued before, I doubt they will be now.
Damn! I wonder if yt-dlp will get a workaround for this.
It might be doable automatically. If they inject the ads at the time of viewing and not before storing the video, then it’s possible that two downloads just a few sconds apart will have different ads. So if yt-dlp downloads twice and compares the two files, theoretically it can get a pretty good idea with high confidence of what content is ad and what content is… well… content.
That technique of course would require multiple downloads of the same file, but yeah. I suppose yt-dlp could also keep a backlog of “fingerprints”/“signatures” of ads its seen in the past that can be used to remove ads from later downloads with the same ads without having to download twice.
Also, even absent such a technique as what I just described, programs like NewPipe and such will still probably allow for manually skipping ads where I’m sure the official YouTube app or the web interface would deny/prevent skipping.
Edit: Actually, it also occurs to me that in order to make ads not skippable, the server will have to send messages to the *official clients saying “and here’s the portion of the video you can’t skip.” In which case yt-dlp or NewPipe or whatever could just be like “oh, cool, that’s the bits I need to skip atuomatically.” And if the server doesn’t send that metadata, then all ads will be skipable on the official clients. (Though I guess I’m assuming that they’ll move exclusively to these injected-into-the-video-stream ads and away from the ads as they work now.)
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With Avidemux, cutting videos is super easy
