YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counteract ad blockers

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Would sponsorblock be a solution for this?
- With a little adoption yes it could. We could pass around checksums of known good blocks, or checksums of known advertisements. Or the audio signature of known good blocks or the audio signature of known advertisements.
  So a service is like sponsor block would now just be a curated list of either good or bad signatures be them checksums or audio signatures or video signatures. There would be some engineering work to account for different compression ratios etc but it's totally doable
- From what I read, this also breaks sponsorblock - as the ads are part of the video, it moves the time stamps of the video so it makes it not correct. The ads will also change I imagine so idk if sponsorblock will be a solution.
  
  So videos that reference timestamps in their own video won't work? And comments that reference a timestamp won't work?
  
  They could on the fly change them.
  
  Wouldn't that need to be done via some kind of API for cross-platform compatibility? An API which could be exploited to detect ad segments?
  
  No, they would just do that internally in their own code, why would they need an API for that?
  
  So that the timestamp adjustment can be propagated via uploader or user comments across YouTube clients on all platforms... i.e. to avoid having to hardcode each adjustment for each ad on each video on every client
  
  Why couldn't they just serve the comments to each client with the ad-adjusted timestamps already? The only thing the client has to request then is the comment page it wants to load, and some unique ID for which the backend remembers which ad version it's associated with.
- No, not in it's actual form, nor the front-ends can't not longer cutting the ads with their current form. Or they change their script, or you have the alternative to use YT or using another streaming service. But I think that there will be other solution in the future to show the middle finger to YT.

94 comments