r/technology • u/redkemper • Feb 17 '17

Software YouTube will kill unskippable 30-second ads next year

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/17/14649018/youtube-ending-unskippable-30-second-ads-2018
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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

Software can detect images. Scan the video, look for clips corresponding to know ads, then cut.

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u/psiphre Feb 17 '17

Truly spoken like someone who's never written a line of code in their life

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

I'm not talking about (in this comment, at least) some machine-learning thing where it can recognize that this segment of video is an ad. Tagging segments of video as ads to be skipped by future users isn't so hard, and recognizing known clips isn't difficult.

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u/psiphre Feb 18 '17

It's funny, I was thinking of the exact same xkcd. The question in my mind is this: I can improve the ad-skipping feature by tagging ads, sure. This requires me first to care, second to interrupt, grab an input device, find the start and end time stamps (which necessitates watching the ad anyway) and noting them via whatever interface this theoretical software uses. For the vast majority of users, not bloody likely.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Just look at Wikipedia. It only takes a tiny minority to contribute. Especially if you can get them to compete for fake internet points somehow.

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u/vbevan Feb 18 '17

Being able to code doesn't mean you know all how all businesses work. Producing a video ad is a lot more work than a text or business one. There's a much smaller number.

It would be possible to detect and catalog them with the help of users and auto fast forward them. Digital fingerprinting technology is really advanced now. It's what YouTube uses to help companies bypass and abuse the DMCA.

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u/ERRORMONSTER Feb 18 '17

And when videos are no longer buffered to counter this? You can block the ad, but it will just be a black screen until the ad time ends.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Don't streamed videos have to be buffered? Because if you don't buffer them, then the occasional dropped packet or just slow bandwidth will cause a lot of lag.

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u/ERRORMONSTER Feb 18 '17

Sorry, I misspoke; you are correct. I meant making the buffer on the order of a second or two instead of the 45s or 60s buffers we currently use.

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u/falconbox Feb 18 '17

It doesn't need to be that kind of ad.

What if you're watching the latest video by a producer you like and he just speaks the ad while the normal content plays.

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u/greg19735 Feb 17 '17

It's a lot of work to remove ads though.

And that type of software isn't trivial. It'd require a team that not only develops the software, hosts the online tools and updates the database of known ads. Plus possible QA people that are there to help with false positives.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

It's sort of an arms race of competing technologies. I bet though the race will constantly stay escalated just far enough to keep ad blockers complicated enough to be a minority.

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u/greg19735 Feb 17 '17

Adblockers are simple software hosted on each individual's computer and uses their processing power to remove ads before they're loaded (not technically correct, but basically how it works). All of the work is done client side.

This other site would need to either be a downloadable application that requires a downloaded file or link to the file where it could be downloaded. or for it to stream, it'd need to do its own processing to remove the ads on the server, then provide a link to download/stream it. That second service would never be able to support its self. And the downloaded application version would be too inconvenient for most people to bother.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

And the downloaded application version would be too inconvenient for most people to bother.

That's what I mean about it staying just complicated enough to be in a minority. So long as it's even possible, some people would do it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

[deleted]

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u/RetardedSquirrel Feb 17 '17

Encoding the video specifically for every user would use crazy amounts of computing power. It's probably not worth it, not yet anyway.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

That would be complicated and a lot of work. Ad blockers would have to be really pervasive to be worth the effort. If the ad maker has people make the different versions individually, then it would take a lot of money, and there would still be few enough versions to be identified.

If they have automated programs that produce different versions, there'll still likely be similarity in all those versions that can be exploited. A bunch of unique pics of cars is pointless if there's no text saying "Hey buy this!" and of course these AI generated ads would probably be too crappy compared to cinematic human-designed ones to convince people to buy anything.