Can you elaborate on the Hulu commercial thing with Adblock? Why would changing duration do anything? If Hulu can detect an adblocker, why not just not do the video at all? Playing a blocked ad for longer doesn't seem to make any sense.
...why not just not do the video at all? Playing a blocked ad for longer doesn't seem to make any sense.
Well, it's actually a fairly clever solution. If the person wants to block ads Hulu won't stop them, it will just make the commercial time take 3x as long ("commercial time" meaning silence in this scenario, since no ad is served, which is actually quite jarring in videos when you have silence for 6 minutes followed by the video continuing). The people who allow ads get to watch the original shorter commercials, meaning they don't have to wait nearly as long.
They could probably block people who block ads and just refuse to serve the video, but that could prevent people from legitimately watching the show if their adblock-checker went haywire. Plus, users would be probably more pissed if you outright blocked them rather than if you made their experience annoying.
