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.
and making them server site, while possible would introduce tremendous amounts of lag, and put that much more load on the servers. Imagine a server that has to handle playback of billions of users all at once. That’s probably quite a bit worse than most average, or even high-level DDoS attacks.
I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.
This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.
Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.
Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.
So you would need buffer barrieres essentially.
Still user watches video. Ad avoidance skips forward to buffer barrier to play ad in the background. Streamed ad is thrown away and new buffer data is received. User does not notice if the video is long enough.
In this case the buffer limit is the metadata.
Sure if you fundamentally change what YouTube you can make it work.
You need very small buffers or complete disablement of seeking even outside of ads. Otherwise a client can reconstruct the video without viewer interruption.
People however expect to be able to skip ahead in YouTube videos, otherwise its just TV.
I just read your list and it confirms mine.
Small buffer AND can’t skip ahead on a boring video because you can only get served the ads to unlock further video after time equal to the served video duration has passed.
That is not YouTube, it’s online TV and there will be an impact on the product. Preloading a video via a 3rd party client will still easily beat this scheme. Just get a headstart equal to the first ad break.
