• UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Isn’t there some law that you have to visually indicate whether a given piece of content is sponsored (ad) or not? Can’t that just be detected by ad blockers to skip/hide ads?

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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        3 months ago

        There isn’t a law that I’m aware of, but typically the ad needs to be un-skippable/seek-able, which means there will always be some indication to the video player of what the user can skip or fast forward through.

        That doesn’t mean Google couldn’t just make fast forwarding/seeking a premium feature, but they’d lose a lot of user appeal if they did so they probably wouldn’t do that

        • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Germany has this law, sponsored segments must be clearly labelled. But one could just hash the ad anyways or just try to fast forward and if it doesn’t work and it would be the ad.

          • anonymous111@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I was thinking about this. Can we crowd source add hash markers, in a similar way to how Sponsor Block opperates but with hashes instead of time stamps?

            • vala@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              It would be pretty trivial for YouTube to change the hashes at random. Might require a clever caching workaround on their end but it’s totally possible to just flip a few bits before serving it.

        • hash@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Even if they do this, I wouldn’t be averse to a less on demand version of youtube. 3rd party apps will let you load a number of videos for later viewing. Would probably help me consume media more responsibly and youtube has to deal with the additional resources needed to serve all the videos I didn’t wind up watching after all.

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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        3 months ago

        I used to have a neat app on my phone that would play “Interdimensional Cable” bits, or just silence, over Spotify ads. It made it a lot more usable.

        Their ad gets played, I don’t have to hear it screaming at me. Win/Win right?

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        2 months ago

        European law says you need to identify paid content, it’s up to the channel to decide how, it’s usually “AD” written in a moderately contrasty color in the top right of the screen

      • XpeeN@sopuli.xyz
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        3 months ago

        It depends on their implementation. If they decided to somehow serve the ad itself and serve the video only after the ad is done, I think that you won’t be able to skip it, maybe only censor it to see a blank video screen or something.

    • j4k3@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I’m not sure about the mechanism, but isn’t this the same thing as ancient early DVR’s like TiVo that would record from the cable stream and omit the ads segments?

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That’s the thing, I don’t think the mechanism exists (or works) yet. I’m confident it will someday, but I didn’t think it worked yet.

    • rtxn@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      IIRC, Twitch uses similar ad injection. Ad blockers get around it by opening new video streams until they find one that isn’t running an ad. Could be wrong though, I’m parroting an uncited comment.

      • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Even then, the only fool proof way of getting around server side ads is using an adblocking proxy that pipes the video stream into a different country. And public proxies available are not foolproof because of excessive traffic or whatnot.

        • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          And specifically this is for TTV.LOL revolving around Twitch.

          I think the same applies to YouTube in the same countries Twitch can’t play ads in. But I haven’t seen anything about YouTube adblocking proxies like TTV.LOL.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      They can block some kinds of server-side ads. And if google has those already, they have been quite successful against youtube.

      But yeah, they won’t block all server-side ads.

      • Ignotum@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Your browser just receives a single video file, there’s no way to tell where in that video there’s an ad, if there even is one

        You can’t remove nor replace it if you don’t know what to remove or replace