The HLS integration we offered definitely had a premium attached to it as well as an additional cost to the CDN that required the integration to live on. So it’s not cheap.
It is weird that Google, with it’s infinite pockets, hasn’t pushed a stream stitched solution all these years until recently.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
The HLS integration we offered definitely had a premium attached to it as well as an additional cost to the CDN that required the integration to live on. So it’s not cheap.
It is weird that Google, with it’s infinite pockets, hasn’t pushed a stream stitched solution all these years until recently.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.