Commercial breaks were when you muted the television and had about two minutes to go to the kitchen or use the bathroom. Even if it's forced, I'm not watching them.

It's funny they think 5 seconds of no content is worst of 10~30 seconds of ads.

Yeah haha.. They really think we would hat it if there is not a ear busting sound which tells you to buy sth for at least 5 sec.

The 5s black screen is automatically becoming a video

It's crazy that Google thinks people would rather watch 15 seconds of ads than 5 seconds of nothing.

suboptimal viewing [of the ads]

I think it's less panicking and more informational. The enshittification of Google has commenced and this is just documentation.

More likely, people will stop using YouTube at all

Hahaha, no.

Considering those are people who only cost them bandwidth and provide nothing in return, that might actually be a net positive for their bottom line.

This is part of a much larger plan. Google wants to establish a new standard that the rest of the internet will follow.

If Google is seen fighting an endless war against ad blockers, it will encourage other websites to do the same.

No longer will it be "Please disable your ad blocker, as advertising supports us and helps keep this content free"

It will start being "Ad blockers are not permitted."

Google wants the Internet to start thinking of allowing ads as requirement for entry, and (via Manifest v3 and web environment integrity checking (which you better believe will be brought back in another form)), they will provide websites the tools to enforce this.

Yeah, people will just use YouTube's competitor.... uh... called... um...

The user agent is in the request header, so it's known before any response is sent from YouTube.

I don't know if that's what they're doing, because it's not possible to know what their server code is doing, making it a far better place to hide sleazy code.

That's out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {

    setTimeout(function() {
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    }, 5E3);

} else {

    c();
    a.resolve(1)

}

It's possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

And I expect it's likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven't had the time to check it myself, but there's probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.

Alternatively, it's funny that people write comments arguing that it wasn't targeted at Firefox users, on a post that already says that it wasn't targeted at Firefox users :P

I keep seeing people throw this idea out there but I have yet to have received a reasonable answer to a simple question: How would content creators get paid on a federated video platform?

That will never work. It simply doesn't work at scale like that, and it's very confusing for the non technical. Creators shouldn't have to worry about anything except uploading and moderating.

Google - Be Evil.