Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
You know… in all my time upon this earth, I cannot look back and think of a single instance where I thought: “Gosh, this advertisement which has inserted itself in between me and the desired content has actually made me want to go purchase that product.”
Ads work. These companies wouldn’t spend millions in them otherwise. Consumer behavior is among the most studied psychological phenomenoms in the world. If you show an ad to one person it’s near impossible to tell if it had an effect or not but show it to a thousand people and you’ll see it.
That’s not how ads work.
Yeah I feel mostly this way too, but the data is solid, ads are effective. Even on me, very rarely. And I’m the type of person who doesn’t ever click ads, out of spite. Even if it’s exactly what I was already looking to actively buy. But every now and then they give me an idea that I pop open a new tab, research, and then buy.
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That’s not really how they work, or that is not the only way. Their point is to put the logo, slogans, company etc into your memory. This way when you’re shopping for something specific, then the brand pops out to you because you’ve seen it and it gives you a sense of familiarity and hence, higher trust.
Likewise. I don’t think I’ve ever been moved or compelled to buy, check out, or even pay attention to a YouTube ad.
To be honest, I once fell victim on reddit to an add that promoted AFK-Arena. It turned out to actually be a decent game.
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At least one popular ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, won’t be trying to get around YouTube’s wall at all. Vergard Johnsen, chief product officer at AdBlock Plus developer eyeo, said he respects YouTube’s decision to start “a conversation” with users about how content gets monetized.
Shitty AdBlock Plus.
ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it’s meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They’ve been accepting money from ad networks to allow their “unintrusive ads” (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I’m sure Google is paying for this to happen now.
shrug
I’m okay with unobtrusive ads as long as the place serving them up has a modicum of common sense sensibilities about their impact and has a rigorous enough vetting process that they’ll never be used as payloads for malicious software. Ads can be a way to find out about products I might otherwise never know about. I’m not outright against all ads as a concept. Hell, sometimes it’s an actual art form in rare cases.
I’m just against them taking up more space than the content itself, impeding my access to the content in any way, hijacking my property, or getting hijacked by malware which then hijacks my property.
AdBlock Minus
AdBlock Divided by Zero
Too bad Google doesn’t want to have a conversation, at least one that isn’t at gunpoint. I wouldn’t mind unintrusive ads. If it stayed at banner ads and things like that, I would probably enable them. Shoving crap in the middle of videos just makes it a horrible experience, so I’m going to get rid of them.
And I am fucking loving it. With this move, Google has effectively started an arms race between the team they have implementing this Adblock-blocking crap and the vast majority of the technically competent internet users in the world.
Unless the rules of how the internet works fundamentally change, Google is not going to win.
Why do you think they were pushing so hard for WEI? They did try to fundamentally change how the internet works.
Precisely.
i wouldn’t be surprised if this was partly a war between the team they have implementing this and the team they have implementing this, in their spare time
I’m not that optimistic. They could implement some sort of aggressive DRM. In the US, all they have to do is label protection as DRM and then it becomes illegal to even have any discussion of how to circumvent it. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t going to bother with any ad blocking. In the end, this could end up hurting Google if people build decentralized Youtube alternatives and then they could take viewers away from Youtube.
They would end up shooting themselves in the foot. They are on shaky ground already and it would only take a new platform that can entice a few of their top content producers over to lose enough chunks of their revenues to hurt. And all they have do is keep fucking around to find out what a tech-literate group of nerds who hate big corps can do when they are aligned in a certain direction.
They can get the rest of Big Tech and the MSM to start smearing the platform as “far right extremist” and spreading “fringe conspiracy theories.”
Yeah, that is easy enough to build into the algorithm. Deprioritizing that sort of nonsense effectively would mitigate it gaining a foothold. The only reason why the current platforms don’t (in fact they prioritize it in many cases) is because discord is being equated with engagement and they see that as good for business. If you aren’t worried about business, then you can set up your priority algorithm to be more rational and egalitarian.
Well, in the US you can legally talk about it so long as you do not actually do it. It’s similar to how an actor is able to talk about commiting murder without getting in trouble.
By some argument, section 103 of the DMCA (which is what grandparent post is referring to) does make it illegal to even talk about DRM circumvention methods.
illegal to: (2) “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in” a device, service or component which is primarily intended to circumvent “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work,” and which either has limited commercially significant other uses or is marketed for the anti-circumvention purpose.
If youtube implements an “access control measure” by splicing the ads with the video and disabling the fast-forward button during the ad, and you go on a forum and say “Oh yeah, you can write a script that detects the parts that are ads because the button is disabled, and force-fast-forwards through those”, some lawyer would argue that you have offered to the public a method to circumvent an access control measure, and therefore your speech is illegal. If you actually write the greasemonkey script and post it online, that would definitely be illegal.
This is abhorrent to the types among us for whom “code IS free speech”, but this scenario is not just a hypothetical. DMCA has been controversial for a long time. Digg collapsed in part because of the user revolt over the admins deleting any post containing the leaked AACS decryption key, which is just a 32-digit number. Yet “speaking” the number alone, aloud, on an online platform (and nothing else!) was enough for MPAA to send cease and desist letters to Digg under DMCA, and Digg folded.
Thanks for the heads-up. Definitely hope that if something like splicing ads in that some country like Russia or any other country that doesn’t care about US law or US copyright law would be able to write, host, and update methods to get around it on a server they control.
the “open source hackers” are always going to win this one, for a simple reason. if the data of the youtube video is handed to a user at any point, then the information it contains can be scrubbed and cleaned of ads. no exceptions.
if google somehow solves all ad-blocking techniques within browser, then new plugins will be developed on the operating system side to put a black square of pixels and selectively mute audio over the advert each time. if they solve that too? then people will hack the display signal going out at the graphics card level so that it is cleaned before it hits the monitor. if they beat that using some stupid encryption trick? well, then people will develop usb plugin tools that physically plug into the monitors at the display end, that artificially add the black boxes and audio mutes at the monitor display side.
if they beat that? someone, someone will jerry rig a literal black square of paper on some servos and wires, and physical audio switch to do the same thing, an actual, physical advert blocker. i’m sure once someone works that out, a mass produced version would be quite popular as a monitor attachment (in a timeline that gets so fucked that we would need this).
if that doesn’t work? like, google starts coding malware to seek and destroy physical adblockers? then close your eyes and mute your headphones for 30 seconds, lol. the only way google is solving that one is with hitsquads and armed drones to make viewers RESUME VIEWING
as long as a youtube video is available to access without restriction, then google cannot dictate how the consumer experiences that video. google cannot win this.
It’s how we did it with MythTV and over the air or cable tv. The algorithms will just save a file in post, that has the ads removed. And that was 15yrs ago.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
good bot
This type of war happened 15 years ago with Hulu vs Xbox. Hulu won because despite there always being an exploit it was always several days before a work around was uploaded. Eventually it was Hulu on xbmc for 1 day, then 3 days no Hulu on and on until everyone gave up.
“against all odds” lmao what. Anyone who’s been paying attention since the dawn of the internet would know that youtube isn’t winning this one. The odds were 100% in the favour of the hackers.
YouTube can’t win this race when they don’t control the platform you’re viewing it on. You can always install ‘something’ to get around it.
The solution to that is to control the platform using Chrome, Android etc.
YouTube’s end game is baked in ads. There are streaming services that already do this so it’s not impossible. It would not surprise me one iota if YouTube isn’t working on this now.
Once this happens, I suspect that the last round of people that have been holding out to subscribe to premium will either cave and do so or people will simply abandon YouTube.
Baked in ads run counter to googles entire ad philosophy though, to say nothing of the technical challenges that poses. Googles big selling point right now is targeted ads where the ads they serve you are based on your activities that they’ve tracked. With baked in ads every viewer of that stream gets the same ads, so while they could traget ads based on the contents of the stream, they would no longer be able to target the ads at specific viewers.
There’s also the problem that baked in ads are in many ways actually easier to skip. There are already extensions like sponsorblock that can skip specific segments of videos, and if it’s not served as a separate stream it will be more difficult to give special treatment to the ad portion of the video.
Baked in personalized ads aren’t impossible.
I can’t remember which streaming service it was (I want to say Tubi?) But they had baked in personalized ads. The technology isn’t far fetched and certainly possible with what youtube already has.
Sponsorblock only works on specific, known timed segments.
Say a video you want to watch has 8 places that YouTube can put up an ad (as determined by YouTube). Out of those 8 places, it decides to serve 5 ads. But the ads are of different lengths.
Sponsorblock can’t block those ads.
I’m not saying people won’t try but YouTube has all the information it needs to serve intrusive ads. And, I hate to say it, but they have the market dominance to pull the rug under premium subscribers feet because you know that in a year or two, they are going to start serving ads to those people too.
Sponsorblock only works on specific, known timed segments.
That’s not true though, sponsorblock is user reported, that’s why it works for sponsor segments and in-video ads of all lengths and locations in videos. If ads get baked into a video they can’t be taken out or changed, since that’s what getting “baked in” means in this context, and as soon as a single user reports the ad it will be blocked by sponsorblock for anyone who uses it. If it can be taken out or changed, then it’s not truly baked in and that can be exploited.
Ah I think we have a different definition of “baked in”.
What I mean is that the video does not change urls or sources when playing the ad and the video. So it looks like an unbroken video feed but on the back end, YouTube added the video between the designated time frames.
I get what you mean that if ads never change and are forever in the video file then sponsorblock will continue to work. But I don’t think this is what YouTube will do.
If they make it in any way removable no matter which end its on then other people will be able to figure out how to remove it too.
All they need to do is fuzz the time when the ad plays to defeat this.
The ads would be baked into the stream, not the source video. This is a fairly trivial problem, and I’m surprised they aren’t doing it already.
As soon as on user does it? Welcome, DoS attack!
This is completely wrong. You are serving video stream, you just substitute for the ad you would serve the user, at a randomized point in the video. YouTube doesn’t do this because they don’t want to reimplement the tracking and logging, but if it was financially necessary it wouldn’t be hard to do.
They would then also need to implement a new (and much less intuitive than 4m20s) way of referring to specific timestamps, since with ads at random points the timecode would be dynamically changing for each viewing.
I have some background in tech but admit I’m a long way out of touch now. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re working on back end stuff to have personalised ads “baked in”. I know the resource implications of this are huge, but it still wouldn’t surprise me.
The resource implications are the problem. The cost - in terms of compute time - to bake those ads eats into the profit earned from advertising as a whole. Since only a fraction of users adblock, they would probably lose more money than they gained.
They’ll consider it once the compute cost inserting the ads is low enough that it’s worth it. I have no idea if we’ve reached that point yet, but I’m guessing not, since otherwise they’d already be doing it.
Most of the formats served by YouTube are already chunked, which means they can easily insert different chunks of video (ads, etc) at various points in the stream by changing the manifest. This is trivial, computationally. The complexity lies in building the mechanisms to make it work.
The non-chunked formats are only used by older devices, and are lower quality. Those would require re-encoding to change, but few users see them anyway, and those users probably don’t adblock.
Platforms can now insert ads directly into the manifest file into totally random timestamps. The file chunks’ names follow the same pattern as the original video. You cannot filter or prepare for it. Probably that will be the future. (AWS MediaConvert can do this for example.)
And they only create the manifest file upon starting the stream so you can inject personalized ads too.
I guess we will have to compare the last video frame and/or audio sample of every segment to the first frame and/or sample of the next segment or something like that?! Maybe the effects of “the loudness war” in ads will help us detect ads solely by the loudness change within the audiostream?
But don’t they do that on their tv app already, that’s why DNS blockers don’t work? I’m pretty sure they serve targeted ads on the tv app.
Wouldn’t SponsorBlock be a way around this?
Platforms can now insert ads directly into the manifest file into totally random timestamps. The file chunks’ names follow the same pattern as the original video. You cannot filter or prepare for it. Probably that will be the future. (AWS MediaConvert can do this for example.)
Meh, download the vid, then have software figure out where the ads are. It’s possible.
Hell, even just present a button for the user to hit when an ad segment starts.
A lot of people are saying this isn’t possible, theyre wrong. It’s called “Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI)” and tldr it places the ads directly in the video itself. One of the popular streaming services uses SSAI, another uses SGAI. Theyre both something the CDN must implement alongside the client.
The technical explanation: SSAI, at least with HLS, places the ad segments within the media playlist. This means there is no additional and easy to block call to the ad server to ask for ads (that’s Server Guided Ad Insertion, SGAI). SGAI places markers where ads need to go in the media playlist, and the client asks the server for some ads to place there.
There’s also CSAI which is fully client side (the client decides where to place ads and how many) but I’d like to doubt youtube uses this. Doesn’t seem very smart.
Even if, lets say, youtube baked the ads into the content segments, it wouldn’t solve anything. There will still be markers and metadata to find where they are (the client needs these to notify ad partners you watched the ad, and to display the yellow “ad” markers, and to display a timer) which can be used to skip them client-side with an extension.
Overall YouTube probably won’t win because there’s always something to do to bypass ads. Some methods are easier to bypass than others, but they’re all enforced client-side in the end. The only thing they could possibly do to have even a fraction of a chance would be to block you from getting the next content segments until the ad duration has passed in real-time. That’s a last resort, however, because that will likely hurt QoS and client stability. There’s a reason it isn’t already done. Don’t forget, also, the developers who work on this stuff don’t like ads either. Nobody is going out of their way to prevent ad blocking beyond what the execs want, and the execs don’t know what they want.
Do note that although I specify HLS there is likely little to no difference with other streaming tech, I just want to be clear about my experience.
If ads are inserted at random time stamps and the client reports the watched intervals, then the server doesn’t need to communicate which intervals are ads.
That could still be bypassed by building a library of ads in the ad blocker, then examining the video feed when an ad is encountered, looking it up in the DB, and automatically jumping ahead as many seconds as its expected duration, but that would be a substantially heavier operation than what uBlock Origin currently does.
It also wouldn’t enable forcing users to watch the ads, since the client wouldn’t know to enforce an unskippable segment from 1:38 to 2:08. And that’s probably the real reason it won’t be implemented - an executive probably has “must preserve these features” as a constraint, so an engineer wouldn’t even propose this feature to them.
The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is because it is a fundamental change to the architecture of the platform, but will very much happen.
Twitch has increased their ad blocking techniques for the last 3 years or so. Twitch has been a lot more advanced and aggressive with their method. Yet, there are still ways to subvert the ads on twitch. If I didnt read lemmy, i wouldnt even know youtube was doing anything. I have just basic adblocking ublock
Although every once in a while, twitch will release a new technique and it might take 24 hours to solve.
You would be surprised how many people will just uninstall the ad blocker the third time YouTube isn’t working for 24 hours.
Every time YouTube or twitch make a change, a certain percentage of users give up, which means more revenue.
The reverse of this is every time I watch youtube without an ad blocker, their ads are SO obtrusive I go right back to “Nah fuck this, FUCK their ability to make money if this is how they go about it”
I have changed my programs because twitch won against its methods. I used to use alt twitch player to get around the ad system. The app creator didnt care to update anymore and twitch’s update broke the system.
All that did though was make me find alternative ways to ad block. If it came to it, if i was unable to block ads. I’d just never watch. Ads are usually full volume screaming at you, so its like an assault on you.
Either way, i think having more viewers is more important than getting an ad to EVERY watcher. IMO Youtube and twitch both lose money on offering their services to everyone. Some people will upload/stream to 0 viewers and i think that its like 50% of their creators. Thats a ton of wasted bandwidth and storage.
IMHO i think twitch could charge something like 3-5$ a month to broadcast a stream. Youtube could charge something like 10c an upload or something.
I get users needing to create content to grow viewerbase, but charge something extremely minimal to get back a little something.
I think you would see significantly less streamers if you did that and they need streamers equally as much as they need viewers.
I bet a lot of the current top streamers would have never given it a chance if they had to pay first.
More content creators are always good, but theres also people on there just wasting resources that will never be successful. Always stream to 0-2 people.
Idk, it’s a tough choice. Which is why they most likely would never use a pay to create style.
I think that’s a big part of why Google doesn’t fight (and in fact helps) the banking and streaming companies that want to lock down Android more. It’s harder to block ads if you can’t block them in the browser and can’t block them system wide via hosts file. (Yes you can use VPN + DNS, but it’s a lot more battery intensive.)
To ad blockers, thank you for your service!
Never under estimate the outrage of a nerd.
They even made a series of movies about it.
Against all odds
lol someone hasn’t been paying attention to how this stuff generally works…
I remember the mini-war between AOL and third-party IM clients. There were days where AOL would send 15kB patches to AIM multiple times a day to break compatibility with the other apps. And they would then fix it within hours.
In the end, AOL gave up.
Wow that’s full on antitrust surely? Or was this before the regulatory precedents were set for Internet providers?
Well, not really.
So AIM was built on an existing chat protocol called OSCAR. The same protocol used in other services. So people eventually figured out how to make chat clients that could log into many different IM services on one app.
This was not sanctioned by AOL, but they allowed it at first. Then they decided you HAVE to use the official AIM client to talk to people on AIM. The third-party developers ignored AOL, so they entered into a tug-a-war match for a while.
Because AOL was using known software to make AIM work, there was only so much they could do to keep their client working while also blocking everyone else. Eventually it became too much of a hassle, so AOL relented and third-party clients kept working until the service was shutdown.
You just reminded me of DeadAim I used to use back in the day. More features. Could log into multiple accounts at the same time with tabs to view different buddy lists. Those were the days…
I miss trillium. Those were the days.
Ah I see. I thought the implication here was that they were doing this to ICQ and the likes
What Google seems to forget or simply not care about is I can always just… leave.
I used reddit a lot more than I use YouTube.
If enough viewers and content creators were to jump ship, they’d scramble to change their tune.That’s a big if though. Unless an actual creator-exodus happens, it’s not going to happen.
It will happen eventually. These kinds of adversarial arrangements between parties are inherently unstable. The enshittification cycle only ends when a site properly collapses. If you think they couldn’t get shittier, give it time. They’ll find a way.
All we need is for a good alternative to become more viable and for the site to have a few more exodus events and it’ll lose its critical mass. Ultimately I think most platforms are going to have to become federated, it’s the only way to avoid enshittification and still grow the network. Growing the network is important because it is the size of youtube and other centralised sites’ networks that gives them their stability and utility. It’s the network effect.
All we need is for a good alternative to become more viable
This is where the biggest challenge lies. Doing what YouTube does is not easy. I don’t think anyone could do it all. So it would have to be picking a choosing. Can anyone upload hours/days/years worth of video content? Are the people who put up those videos able to get paid without having to create their own relationships with advertisers or asking for viewer donations? How are copyright violations handled? Or more sinister video content?
Peertube is a federated system that already handles video.
Moderation is handled by instances with more personal mods.
Bandwidth is handled via multiple instances & p2p protocols so viewers help distribute the load.
I think you’re overstating how difficult youtube’s job is. A lot of that work is problems youtube creates for thsmselves by trying to squeeze their platform for more money. A federated platform doesn’t have that issue.
I don’t disagree with you, I’m just saying that YouTube is nothing without both its creator and viewers.
A viewer-exodus and a creator-exodus would be tied together, they both feedback into each other.I even get why YouTube doubledown on catering to their advertisers over the creators and viewers, that’s just money talking.
I’m just saying I don’t owe them my time or attention.
They would hardly be the first Internet giant to fall, thinking they’re too big to fail, not that I see it happening soon though.Very true. But if Reddit didn’t fall I very much doubt YouTube will.
Perhaps you and I might leave, but it won’t be enough.
And creators wont leave despite making less and less from youtube and relying more and more ftom direct support from fans, like through patreon.
I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.
The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.
As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.
What are you using instead for Maps and email?
I use Organic maps and K9 mail
k9 mail has a really poor rating on the app store. I hear Thunderbird will be revamping it though. Are you happy with where it is at right now?
Yeah, it works great. I haven’t had any problems
I’ve had good success with FairEmail its open source and on Fdroid appstore but google made it so it will only work if you download through the play store which is BS.
Definitely fair email, code is solid and so is the dev. Its got more features for customization than any other mobile email client. Super frequently updated too. And no ads even in the unpaid version.
Apple Maps and Fastmail.
Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.
What FOSS mobile OS are you using?
Non-Google Android.
Exactly, I had people tell me that we should support YouTube, because it costs money and if we don’t it will disappear.
I would celebrate the day it would happen, YouTube is actually the reason we don’t have much competition there. They used their position and Google monopoly in other areas to establish this monopoly.
Not going to happen. Most of us, and the ones making the service profitable pay.
You have no value for Google and lemmy isn’t a population Google cares about in the first place.
Why would creators leave? They only earn money from users that watch ads or use premium. Ad blocker users leaving doesn’t affect them.
And if you “just leave”, guess what? You just saved them a few bucks in bandwidth. It’s a win-win for them.
It’s YouTube, they don’t need “exposure”. They are out to make a profit.
I donate to creators I like.
Don’t be evil turned into straight up evil with Manifest V3. Already switched to FF as my primary and started shifting my use of Evil’s services.
They ditch the “do no evil” motto years ago when seeking military contract to help them kill people
I was suspicious the moment they said “don’t be evil”.
Non-evil people don’t need to say it.
“against all odds” my left asshole. This is always the way of hacker vs defense, it’s always an arms race and the attacking side always has the advantage.
How many assholes do you have?
A left one and a right one.
And a center one. Well, that’s what I call myself. The central asshole.
Not really. There are lots of protocols and such that haven’t been broken in any meaningful ways. Attackers have advantage is a weird thing to say.
Defense is always playing reactive. Attack gets to be creative and figure out how to break whatever tools defense has. Defense has to wait until the vulnerability is found and then deal with it. It’s the nature of the arms race with regards to cyber security.
Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.
sigh developers will ALWAYS be able to outsmart companies stealing from others.
I was gonna say, the Internet wouldn’t be what it is today without those so-called open source hackers. They’re the giants that Google and all the rest are standing on the shoulders of.
We’re going to relearn this lesson with LLMs. Open source is a maximalist approach to productivity.
Meshkov said that assessment [that scriptlet injection is the only reliable method of ad blocking for youtbue] is accurate if you limit yourself to browser extensions (which is how most popular ad blockers are distributed). But he pointed to network-level ad blockers and alternative YouTube clients, such as NewPipe, as other approaches that can work.
How exactly do these youtube front ends survive Google anyways? Why can’t Google simply block all the traffic coming from these front ends in order to kill them off entirely? Kind of interesting that some ad blockers are having a hard time being effective on YT while these front ends seem to be having no issues accessing videos on the site.
Client side versus server.
To use a metaphor: the internet is a mailperson, and a YouTube video is a package. The mailperson hands it off to me. Then I have to fumble with opening the box to get the item inside.
Well, let’s say I have a butler. The butler can take the package from the mailman, and rip out all the unnecessary stuff, and give me what’s inside the box. The butler is adblock.
YouTube/Google cannot mess with my butler. Why? Because it’s outside of their power. They can try to do things like force a signature before giving me the package. But guess what? My butler can sign off my package. YouTube knows to get to me, they have to go through my butler - period.
So there’s no “blocking traffic” because once the package is sent, they have to deal with my butler. And they can make all sorts of detectors on the package, but we’ll keep finding ways to bypass it and convince the package that my butler can totally sign for me.
There is no way to determine if the request comes from an alternative frontend or a legitimate user. Even if they start blocking all public instances of alternatives, which is highly unfeasible since most of them use VPN and blocking all VPNs is extremely restrictive for legitimate users too, you can host them locally.
If someone hosts their own front end, Google has no way of knowing whether or not it’s legitimate.
Really enjoying LibreTube on my phone, for listening to long videos without the video on screen. Its audio mode is very clean in my opinion.
Google could implement Widevine DRM for all videos.
In order for someone to experience the video, it has to go from digital to analog. That will always be the weakpoint of DRM. Someone can always put a middleman application in that point. Expect corporations to push for chip implants that allow them to directly control what you experience.
