I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
I’m getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company’s relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
Hey don’t blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The 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.
Yes, that’s also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.
Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.
And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn’t paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I’ll miss them.
What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?
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.
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.
Wouldn’t it still need overhead to chose those blocks and send them instead of the video? Especially if they’re also trying to do it in a way that prevents the user from just hitting the “skip 10 seconds” button like they might if it was served as part of the regular video.
You’re forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn’t designed to do this
This is not necessarily the case.
You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.
The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software
But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming
You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.
This isn’t how YouTube has streamed videos for many, many years.
Most video and live streams work by serving a sequence of small self-contained video files (often in the 1-5s range). Sometimes audio is also separate files (avoids duplication as you often use the same audio for all video qualities as well as enables audio-only streaming). This is done for a few reasons but primarily to allow quite seamless switching between quality levels on-the-fly.
Inserting ads in a stream like this is trivial. You just add a few ad chunks between the regular video chunks. The only real complication is that the ad needs to start at a chunk boundary. (And if you want it to be hard to detect you probably want the length of the ad to be a multiple of the regular chunk size). There is no re-encoding or other processing required at all. Just update the “playlist” (the list of chunks in the video) and the player will play the ad without knowing that it is “different” from the rest of the chunks.
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.
Yeah, I’ve thought the same. It’s like with ads on websites - ads are served from different domains and as blockers work by denying requests to those domains. If they really wanted they could serve the ads from the same domain as the rest of the website. I guess one day they might but so far it must not be worth it.
Sponsor Block Addon does it fine.
However I have bigger complains for my Firefox cannot handle most videos anymore. Affected are those with many ads. It starts with a still image and if I don’t quit the video within 10 seconds, my desktop environment crashes, bouncing me back to the login screen. 💩
Did you read the article? The article shows a post from Sponsorblock and it specifically states that they turned off sponsor block submissions on effected browsers since they can’t be reliable with the new ad delivery method
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.
