this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.
You're forgetting the part where the video is coming from a cache server that isn't designed to do this
They're already appending ads to the front of the video. Instead of appending an ad at key frame 1 they append the ad at key frame 30,000.