This is really cool. And I have a question about HTML5 video in general: how would an HTML5 player prevent users from messing with ads if it were used by a site like Hulu?
Generally, sites that serve longer video segments (like Hulu) use flash streaming (so the video is not a single file but many fragments served via a special media server), so swapping out the client player would be considerably more difficult.
HTML5 video is not supposed to be used for video streaming at all. I think it is doubtful that companies with the concerns you described would use the video tag.
What makes me think HTML5 is not for streaming? Streaming video technology works differently.
What makes me think companies with the concerns outlined by the OP would not consider HTML5? It would be much more difficult to control their content. Flash is great as a hard to penetrate content container. Exposing your content by using HTML + JS to display it is less than ideal if you want to serve ads/make it difficult to steal content.
Youtube streams the file. Youtube also serves ads. Youtube, as exemplified by the OP and by my link is experimenting with an HTML5 player. But you are right. HTML5 has this problem of exposing the player, so any mechanisms in the javascript to force ad viewing can be more easily defeated.
A possible solution would be to track user session and force a new ad on every new session (so you can't clear cookies). That way ad tracking can persist outside of the video player itself by using the cookie.
The other problem is, who serves video files themselves anymore? So if Youtube, or any other video services who depend on ads to keep themselves afloat can't use the HTML5 video tag, who will?
Who will? Anyone who wants to serve video without interstitial ads. Think about the world before Youtube-like sites. How did we embed video? Often times hosted on our own servers. If I want to serve up a dynamic video for example, right now Youtube-like services do not allow me to do that. I think dynamic video is a great use case for the video tag e.g. splicing a use photo into video.
It seems to me that unless the ad is prepended to the actual video file then using javascript we can tell when an ad is playing and kill it/skip to the "real" content. On the other hand the average user probably does not have the expertise to kill ads, so maybe the point is moot.
Yes but someone can easily make a browser extension that kills it for them.
Or use firebug and inject javascript into the page.
I think people stopped embedding videos and started using third party tools because it makes it easier. Third party tools will always make it easier. No need to worry about bandwidth, file space, etc (even if the cost of these items are going down). And as long as these tools make it easier, these tools will probably want control of their players and will want to put ads in them.
Yes I know, and you can retrieve the FLV file from your cache too. Sorry for using the wrong technical term but for the point at hand it is irrelevant.
Actually it'd be more in YouTube's interest to control the playback experience since they use HTTP streaming, since the stream is less controllable by itself.
But of course, you can download full HD TV shows without DRM from other places on the Internet. I consider Hulu proper punishment for people that have never heard of usenet.
