this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
2044 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59696 readers
2476 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That IS how YouTube works. Let's say you are watching a YT video. What your YouTube app/ website does, is that it downloads a certain portion of the video from the server. This small part is called a "buffer". That's where the word "buffering" comes from. Now, for the ad to be displayed within the video stream itself, it would need to be downloaded in this buffer somehow. Therefore, while there is a buffer in place, all of my above points would apply.
Completely eliminate the buffer you say (ie., stream the video bit by bit by reducing the buffering size dramatically) ? Well, then you would need an ultra stable internet connection to YouTube's servers, without any ping difference. Good luck with that. Especially, good luck with doing that in developing countries, whose populations make up the majority of the world.
If that is true, then how is it possible for software to determine the difference between a commercial and content? They are streamed from a different source. I'm suggesting that YouTube could encode the commercial in the same stream as content, and as far as the player is concerned, there would be no difference.
Read point 3 again. Regulations require companies to visually distinguish between ads and non-ads. That's why u get the yellow box with "ad" written in it, which indicates that the video that u r watching currently is an ad.
Software could thus use this factor very easily by scanning the stream for such an indicator. The moment it finds something like this, it skips to a frame where this indicator isn't present.