The video website will eventually have the upper hand by embedding the ads in the video stream like Twitch in that war you mention. Now at best you get a black screen while the ad runs and you block it.
I don't know how Twitch ads work (never seen an ad on Twitch tbh) but I suppose they would still need some additional metadata, for example for the player to show the button to visit the advertiser. TV-like, non-interactive ads would be a downgrade from the advertisers' point of view.
> Now at best you get a black screen while the ad runs and you block it.
Why not skip it? We already have SponsorBlock that works wonderfully. How would this be conceptually different?
The big draw of Twitch is live content and interacting with chat, they just serve you an ad and not serve the stream content during that time. How could you skip it?
Youtube can make it so that it stops serving content for 30 seconds and disable buffering when it's showing a 30s unskippable ad. People without ad block would watch the ad for 30 seconds so no difference for them, people with ad blockers have to wait for 30 seconds. The only way would be to predownload like a DVR and then skip the ads or blank space, which would get annoying fast.
Some people were using proxies and VPNs in some foreign countries that don't have Twitch ads served to bypass, but that's also been blocked now.
> The big draw of Twitch is live content and interacting with chat, they just serve you an ad and not serve the stream content during that time. How could you skip it?
So do they just discard the livestream while serving the ad? What if you miss something important because of that? This just feels awful all-around for everyone involved.
Ads always interrupted live video for folks without Amazon Prime. Then they removed 'no ads' as a Prime perk and added it to Twitch Turbo at $8.99 per month. Now they made it $11.99
To make it a bit better they started showing the stream video without audio as a small thumbnail on top of chat when an ad plays.
Because 95% of the streams are too small to be profitable but take up a lot of bandwidth costs. Microsoft's Mixer threw in the towel and Kick is bankrolled by online casino money. There's not much competition. YT live is okay but lacks critical mass and will monetize the same way once it gets popular.
