TL;DW: the ads will be in the video stream itself which will mess up timestamps, sponsor block uses timestamps to know when the ads are.
Seems to me that this will also break every other use case of specific times like direct linking to a timestamp of a video, right?
This sucks for so many. People use timestamps for content warnings or to help viewers avoid spoilers. Commenters use timestamps when talking about the content of the video. It’s insane to change this once it’s so ingrained in how people use the website.
It’s also how content creators literally create chapters: put the time codes into the video description
That’s a native feature of the platform
Hopefully they’ll realise it’s a bigger breaking change than they wanted as part of this testing phase
I’d imagine YouTube subtracts the ad length from posted timestamps when clicking a link containing one. But we are taking about Google, soooooo…
In the cat and mouse game, the cat can adjust tactics but the mice eventually figure out an alternative route. I’m sure they will find a way with this. Either that or a lot of people will just stop watching YouTube, I’d imagine.
It will end up being like FreeVee on Prime for anyone who’s ever watched a movie or anything on there. They straight up randomly just inject ads in at random times, often not even during scene breaks. Characters are sometimes mid-sentence… Oh, and we’re back to the volume of the ads being 2x louder than the movie itself because I guess that law Congress passed way back in the day only applied to cable and broadcast TV.
It makes it nearly unwatchable. So get ready for that experience.
