Video transcoding at scale seems such a "solved problem" nowadays, I'm surprised YouTube hasn't moved to baking ads into the main video stream directly when they're served to non-Premium users - they control the player so could still let people skip them after certain time periods, etc. Maybe the revenue lost to extra compute needed doesn't balance out yet.
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Video transcoding at scale seems such a "solved problem" nowadays, I'm surprised YouTube hasn't moved to baking ads into the main video stream directly when they're served to non-Premium users - they control the player so could still let people skip them after certain time periods, etc. Maybe the revenue lost to extra compute needed doesn't balance out yet.
Encoding is terribly computationally expensive. You wouldn't want to do it at scale for every viewer, the RoI would be poor.
What you can do, is splice in pre-encoded ads and that works okay if done correctly. It's also practically impossible to detect/block.