> What does "server side injection" actually mean?
The way ads usually work is that they are separate video files that are fetched by the YouTube client (e.g., the browser) and then displayed to the user. Ad blockers modify the content of the web site such that the URLs to those ads (usually embedded in some JSON object from an API endpoint or something like that) get removed so that no ads are displayed.
Server side injection in this context means that the server renders a video file on demand that contains the original clean video plus a few ads here or there. Blocking the ads now is much harder because you cannot simply manipulate API responses containing refrences to those ads because there is only this one video file. Instead you would need to implement a mechanism that skips those ads in the player.
AFAIK server sie injection is already done on twitch for live streams where blocking ads is really basically impossible because you cannot skip anything in a live stream. I think the best solution for twitch to get rid of ads is to use a VPN/Proxy in a country where no ads are delivered for contractual reasons.
The way ads usually work is that they are separate video files that are fetched by the YouTube client (e.g., the browser) and then displayed to the user. Ad blockers modify the content of the web site such that the URLs to those ads (usually embedded in some JSON object from an API endpoint or something like that) get removed so that no ads are displayed.
Server side injection in this context means that the server renders a video file on demand that contains the original clean video plus a few ads here or there. Blocking the ads now is much harder because you cannot simply manipulate API responses containing refrences to those ads because there is only this one video file. Instead you would need to implement a mechanism that skips those ads in the player.
AFAIK server sie injection is already done on twitch for live streams where blocking ads is really basically impossible because you cannot skip anything in a live stream. I think the best solution for twitch to get rid of ads is to use a VPN/Proxy in a country where no ads are delivered for contractual reasons.