YouTube has found a new way to load ads

So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they're finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?

No, because that would be communism, and that killed 100 million people. You also think genocide is bad, aren't you? And besides of that, if there were less regulations, you could make your own video platform to challenge Google's monopoly! /s
- i think people may have missed that you're not serious
- This kind of messages should have a "/s" attached. IMHO, that's just proper Netiquette.
This is a good question.
Great, now it's Russian roulette every time you hit that pause button. <clickPause> ¡BOOM ZERODAY MALWARE!
No, at least not in the USA. They're still protected under Section 230, which makes them immune from liability of third-party content on their platform.

now serving up the ads directly to me

What do you think they were doing before? 🤔
- Does anybody know how this will affect the EU?
no because of sec 230 and publisher rights, they were still directly serving them before, the only difference now is that it's tied into the video stream directly, rather than broken out as a second one.
- In the past they have always said that they aren't transmitting the content and so it's the responsibility of the transmitter of the data. Now the content at least appears to be coming from youtube not the advertisers. So I'm curious if that's enough to make it fall under section 230 which would require that they make a good faith effort to remove "objectionable" content.

Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.

If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.

If all else fails, I'd enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I'll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.

Yep. YouTube must include a manifest with each video to tell the player what time ranges are un-skippable. Baked in ads were doomed from the beginning 🤡
- Are they? What if the server refuses to serve the video until the ad’s duration has passed? You’d have no better option than to hide it, which most people wouldn’t bother with.
always be detectable

Maybe with some content ID system… but you’ve just predicted their 2025 update which we might imagine would go something like this:
- I briefly touched on this in a lengthy comment when this scheme was originally floated a few months ago. Your prediction, which granted is something that Youtube/Google absolutely would try if they thought they could get away with it, would only work on viewers that remained within the confines of Youtube's native player.
  
  Any third party app capable of bullying or tricking Youtube into handing them the video data is free to do whatever it wants to with it afterwards, even if this ultimately means impeccably pretending to be the official Youtube player in order to get the server to fork over the data. Furthermore, video playback is buffered so a hypothetical pirate client would have several seconds worth of upcoming video to analyze and determine what it wants to do with it.
  
  Youtube could certainly make this process rather difficult by including some kind of end-to-end DRM or something, but at the end of the day you need to make a playable video stream arrive on the client's device or computer somehow, and if you can't guarantee full control of the entire environment in which that happens, dedicated nerds will find a away to screw with that data.
I wish I had more upvotes to give this comment cause you are so on the money.
My brain just does that anyway, after decades of ads I just tune them out. And at home I use ad blockers.
- That's not how it works. Or, rather, that's not only how it works. Sure, advertisers dream of users who see an ad once and run to buy a product. But ad effects are spread over time. They build brand recognition. They fake familiarity. Say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a new type of product that you haven't bought before. Very likely you'll pick something familiar-sounding, which you heard in an ad. Ads pollute the mind even if the most obvious effects are, well, obvious and easily discarded, more subtle influence remains.
i remember when i put a video at 2x speed the next ad i got was also at 2x speed lmao
No you don't have to be able to detect it if you can't skip. Since they're injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.

All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you're working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you're using it to abuse commercials.

I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you're just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there's not really a lot they can do about that.
- I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
  
  I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
  
  What you're saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: "here's a frame", "okay, I watched that frame", "okay, here's the next frame".
  
  With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn't work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
- Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
  
  horrendously bad UI, this should never be done, recalculate the time, maybe. But don't just make it negative, that's fucking stupid.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.

Mission failed sucessfully, if people can speed up or scroll through the ad, then it kind of defeats the point since people can skip ahead or increase the speed.
- Hence "mission accomplished"
Unless you are watching live content, you are correct
surely they're going to make the ads vary in speed, that would be a horrid UI mistake.

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% 💪💪)
- 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
- Line go up 💹
- 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.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
- "Line go up" is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
  
  Gives me a fucking headache.
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all....
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
- I'm not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
  
  But they're not trying to do that. Profit isn't enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
  
  So they put in ads. But that's not enough and oh look there are more places we haven't put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don't we sell that too? Hey guys, we've heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small ~~protection payment~~ subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don't like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we're adding ads back into the service. But don't worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don't think that last one's happened with YT premium yet, but it's happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn't put it past them.)
  
  There's no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
- I would love to be a subscriber if Google could guarantee that they won't take my viewing information and then sell it to other advertisers or data brokers, or use that info to push ads on behalf of those brokers in other Google products.
  
  As it stands now, why would I pay with my money AND my data? Google shouldn't get to double dip.
- They’d have more paying subscribers if they didn’t charge more than Netflix for what amounts to user-generated content that they’re getting for free.
- The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube's.
  
  We need that money more than they do.
- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/02/us-cities-and-states-give-big-tech-93bn-in-subsidies-in-five-years-tax-breaks
  
  They get loads in governments tax breaks and they data mine the fuck out of us so fuck them and their ads.
  
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/19/social-media-companies-surveillance-ftc
  
  I'll continue to block them as long as we can and then move on to something else if we can't. By paying you are just rewarding this exploitative behavior.
  
  If you simply must pay for something then donate it to a charity instead. These companies do not need your money.
- Ads give more profit than subscriptions, since if you would adjust subscription price to match ad income, too less people would buy it at that price.
  
  Source: Netflix and Disney Ad-supported tier analysis.
- I’m using lemmy right now and it’s not ad supported and I’m not the product.
  
  It’s always weird to me when people post on lemmy and just assert something that implies lemmy is impossible, bro your using it right now!
- ah yes all you have to do is spend like 100 USD yearly, ever year, and pay for features you don't want, just so youtube can maybe stop posting ads.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 10% where do you get that. The data I have heard is it’s around a third of all internet users globally.
- 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..
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.
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'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.

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.

[Enshittification intensifies]

Well it’s what people want. No one even is complaining about the ads wants to pay for anything. And stuff costs money no matter what people choose to believe. Creators need to eat YouTube has costs. Money has to come from somewhere.
- Honestly, if there was a remotely reasonably priced premium version of just youtube, no music or movies or whatever they try to shove down your throat nowadays, I would pay for that. But instead they rather price hike and make the ads more intrusive.
- maybe if youtube didn't club itself over the head with the adpocalypses that happened, they wouldn't be in a position right now where every youtuber ever just integrates their ads directly into their videos.
  
  They're monetizing in other ways as well, memberships especially.

If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I'd probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.

This is exactly me.

I’ve been paying £5 a month by using a VPN to sign up for Premium from Ukraine. Been doing so for the past couple of years without complaint. Literally all I need from them is to fuck off the adverts. I have Apple Music for music and I’m happy with it.

Now they’ve rumbled us and will be cutting off our Premium next month.

I am fucked if I’m paying those ratfuckers £20 a month just so I can watch other people’s hard work without the adverts they force in. Fuck that noise.

So I’m now researching ways to get my subs onto Plex so I can carry on watching on my Apple TV.
- I use this for my plex yet subscriptions https://ytdl-sub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  
  Note they will throttle ips so I recommend a vpn if you’re snagging huge channels.
I get what you’re saying, but YouTube music is pretty much just a different front end for the normal site.

Sure, it does some filtering to attempt to be music only (though I’ve seen non music stuff sneak in before) but in the end, you get pretty much the same core experience if you open up the YouTube app and start “watching” a song (with premium for the background play capability).

I’d be willing to bet this is why they won’t go the route you’re talking about.
- I'd prefer some kind of limited amount of viewing. I don't watch a ton of YT, so give me some kind of reasonable ad-free cap. I'm willing to pay to not see ads, but I don't watch enough to be worth their asking price.
Even then it doesn't have sponsorblock or a customisable UI like revanced does.

It's crazy how unofficial free is actually better than official paid.
- See, I don’t really mind the sponsored segments. Some creators actually have fun with their ad reads, like the Map Men or Colin Furze. But if it’s boring I just tap the forward button on my Apple TV remote and skip past.
And then there are people like me, who aren't opposed to paying for access in theory, but will never be okay with having the videos I watch be tied to an account. It's inconvenient and I don't trust Google with my watch history, even when the option is turned off.

Also I wouldn't pay until: Youtube stops showing ads for hate groups; stops its manipulative recommendations and push towards right-leaning and extremist content; stops manipulating creators to all make the same kind of video in order to please the algorithm; removes hate content and extremist content; stops auto-flagging and removing fair-use content.
I'm a bit surprised they don't do this actually. Premium is good valued off you use the music side of it as well, which I do, but not for just ad free YouTube.
yep, we're back at "piracy is a service issue"

So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?

Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.

Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.

The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
- So YouTube Premium is as worthless as I thought. Google was never great in drawing recognizable lines between their free offering and paid... and it seems their solution is to make everything as shitty as possible and barely fix the stuff they fucked up.
  
  Let's wait until Google Maps gets ads .... routing already seems fishy to me.
  
  Thanks for your brief description... only shows me that my next Phone won't be a Pixel.

Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.

The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?

Seems like a good use of AI/ML.

The fucked up part is that I have to use SponsorBlock even with Premium. I thought I was paying for no ads…like wtf?

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it's a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it's essentially how regular TV works.

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.

Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.

YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷‍♂️

Just matter of time

Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn't have to be handled clientside.
- Well the player and its controls are client side.

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
- It all sounds insane to me because I treat every TV like a computer monitor. Whatever I plug into it is what it displays. I usually ignore the onboard software as much as possible.
That's exactly what I started doing this year. I've read 32 books already and it gives me much more satisfaction than watching stupid "like & subscribe to my patreon" videos.

The arms race continues.

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.

On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues

AB testing, you probably haven't been affected yet

I've been getting around it by setting my frontend to use an embed request, that way YouTube thinks it's a third party embed and the ad injection doesn't work. I've also in the past geospoofed to Russia and that works to block ads too.

The battle goes on and on.

I read about some sucker that paid for YouTube premium and still got ads in his pause screen. Lol.

MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.

Could you supply a source for this?
- Go download MythTV yourself. Shit's been available for decades. I used to use it with a capture card to timeshift/DVR cable television. The source is me. I used it. It was great. It auto-removed TV ads when it recorded your shows.
  
  https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Removing_Commercials#Automatically_removing_commercials

I just want the Temu ads to stop

Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don't know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.

Crowdsourced "tagging" of the affected area of the video timeline (like Sponsorblock) would fix this, unless Google get really devious and randomize the placement of the ad for various users.

It will always be randomized, otherwise it's not targeted. There's no reason to run Swedish pampers ads in the US or Walmart ads in Japan.
- I mean placement within the video timeline. E.g. do all users see the ad at 0:00 or 2:00 or does it jump around for everyone to prevent it from being tagged.
- "Placement" ie. on the timeline, friend. Not target.
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
- Affected*
- This breaks the current SB implementation, but if the ad duration is known and consistent across the userbase then it will fix itself as users tag videos with the "new" timestamps.
I wonder if you could just download the video twice and then remove any frame not present in both copies

It's like Alphabet hate guaranteed money.

"How can we boost the next six months of investment for sake of stable income over the next decade?"

"More ads. Studies show everyone with internet access fucking loves them."

*Brilliant! Welcome to entry level lower senior-ish management, Jenkins."

"YESSSSS! I can't wait to tell the family about this when I'm on leave from this wonderfully accommodating work campus. All hail, G."

"All hail, G."

Fuck them, but it's not like anything changes for people who currently watch ads, or who pay for Premium. It's us who they're fighting, and we don't generate any income.

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.

I'm surprised it took them so incredibly long to crack down on adblockers.

They used to still be only a small percentage until the entire internet got completely decimated by ads in the past 5 years.

So AdGuard works on the YouTube website. I haven't been there for some time - I use 2 other methods to watch YouTube ad-free.

Newpipe - Android app that works by parsing the website, will probably be affected?
YouTube Kodi add-on - works with Google YouTube API, I was wondering when this loophole is going to be plugged..

Anyone with knowledge of the matter care to comment? So far my YouTube watching is still ad-free.

I also run pi-hole in front of my WiFi. Nothing gets through. Or will it?

I noticed some podcasts these days have random server injected ads - usually the same ad repeated 2 or 3 times, is this going to be my video stream soon?

If ads are injected server-side like the article is taking about, your downloads in Newpipe and Kodi are going to have the ads in them.
Pihole will not work because it works on the DNS queries. With server side injection it’s gonna be tougher to block ads, but I’m sure we’ll find a way
Nothing gets through. Or will it?

You would have to block the video itself to get rid of them
use ublock origin, so far it's been pretty much problem free.

Outside of this, use something like yt-dlp to run your own jellyfin instance or something.

now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time.. oef

YouTube alternatives?

until it stops working, yt-dlp and jellyfin.
- Wouldn't yt-dlp be forced to download the server-side ads, too?
Odysee (they said no to ads recently)

Rumble, Peertube

To follow creators you could try GrayJay https://grayjay.app/

Wouldn't that technology make them easy to ~~rewind~~ fast-forward?

Happy I left google 90% and I am trying to leave the services that I cannot change my email or require a Google account

My last bastions of Google are:

Email. Its rock solid stable, but I know they are using it to mine data. This is a good service...but im still looking at proton at some point to make the switch. Or coming up with a solution myself.

Maps. Maps is also another really good service they give out for free. I have tried a huge number of alternatives, but still have no real alternative. OSM+ is the closest and works really well in emergencies but its pretty terrible at searching for anything specific to get to.

Youtube. This is the one I think I can possibly remove at some point. Some creators have their videos on other sites so it might be a mishmash for a while. But the best ones dont. I might just get into audio-books or some other sort of entertainment. Peertube is also a great alternative. And throwing money at [email protected] might be better in the long run.

Ironically their search has taken a turn for the worse, so other sites are much better in my opinion.
- For me it's prob
  
  Google play store: Cannot DEGoogle phone at this time
  
  Gmail (partially and currently moving)
  
  Youtube (idk if this counts but a frontend am using to watch yt videos)
  
  Google maps partially (only for streetview Usally)

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.

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

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.
Why would it involve re encoding?

There was a brief point in YouTube’s history where there were little-to-no ads, and creators weren’t expecting to make a living off the videos they made. Somewhere down the line, it feels like the wrong turn was taken from a content consumers perspective.

Yes, hosting is expensive between the infrastructure and bandwidth requirements, but there already was a model in traditional web hosting where the hosting provider charges for the hosting infrastructure, as well as storage and bandwidth costs. While we’re all so accustomed to accessing sites for free and fast, I think that there should’ve been a “free” tier for uploads which could’ve been kept at 10 mins or w/e and rate limited, while offering paid tiers for longer, higher quality/fidelity content , and larger bandwidth buckets before rate limiting which could help offset YTs costs, as well as temper expectations of what it means to create and watch.

Heck, there could even be a paid tier for viewers that could even allow viewers to watch “free” uploads without being limited, and the viewer would be supporting as well.

Yes, that means that large scale, Mr. Beast style productions would be a lot less feasible, but I feel like it’s not just the platform that being enshittified, but also the amount of aspiring creators who’ve also come out of the woodwork copying or re-uploading other creators content in hopes of getting blessed by the algorithm for a free payout.

I know these are 2 separate issues, and the ship has sailed long ago, but I can’t help but feel like this whole business model is being done wrong from a sustainability perspective.

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.

Can I ask why people act like YouTube is so evil for trying to make money off their site? They provide a service I value and it costs money to do so. No disrespect to anyone who doesn't want to watch ads or pay (like I do, I use it a LOT) but I don't understand why some people seem to be personally insulted by the idea that they can't get it for free forever with no strings attached.

Honest question, please don't flame me 🙏

I pay other sites for creators. So for me $$ isn't the issue. Not when premium is less than 20.

The biggest issue with YouTube for me is that their ads are very intrusive/track quite a bit about what you do/can actually be malware. On addition, there's a good chance that money is mostly going to YouTube and not the people creating their works. There's a reason patreon is a thing for most successful creators. I also hate ads. I don't hate people getting paid, I hate YouTube for shoving ads down my throat and then turning around not paying people their dues. And in my opinion the worst way possible.
YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.

Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.
Partially for the same reason I don't pay for Xbox live and whatever Nintendo and Sony have; I refuse to pay a service charge for an online platform when I already purchased the hardware (in this case, computer/phone) and pay an ISP for internet access.

If they want my data and to use my bandwidth they can damn well pay for it.
- Do you realize you're using their bandwidth, too? They have to pay for upload/download just like you do.
I pay for Nebula - $30 a year which is about £22.50. That won't even cover two months of YouTube Premium (£12 pm), and there's not even the discounted yearly option in the UK.

And "if you're not paying you're the product" is wrong - YouTube/Google would still be datamining my viewing habits to sell to advertisers.
Noooo, this is Lemmy. If it isn't free to use and 20% as good as the paid version, its evil.

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. 😅🤦
The blog talks about how this changes is also breaking sponsorblock
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.

Quick! Everyone! Hurry up and climb over one another to proclaim your hatred for YouTube and their practices so that you can have more time to go watch more YouTube videos!

😆

awe, I'm so proud of you; you figured out what a monopoly is!!
- Oh I’ve known. The difference is I’m not dumb enough to continue using shit I hate.

YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog