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.
You can still do dynamic ad serving in a stream stitched integration. It’s just that the content and the ads are being served by the same CDN, hence why you can’t block the ads without also blocking the content. In the manifest file there are m3u8 chucks, the file is essentially broken up into 5/10 second chunks, and when the video segment chunk is coming to an ad break, it stitches in dynamically an ad m3u8 chunk that the ad server dynamically selects based on the ads they currently have trafficked in their system.
I worked at a video ad server that offered a stream stitched solution going back to 2013. It comes down to development work/cost that the companies need to take on. Ultimately they would benefit from the cost required, but they wanted to be cheap and do a client side solution instead.
That’s exactly what it was! She had twins at the same grade level and she didn’t want them reading those books. This was in South Carolina, so this type of behavior was expected. The Karen’s ruled South Carolina…
My 5th grade teacher killed my desire to read at an early age when she banned the class from reading Goosebumps during “Pleasure reading time”.
You are correct, which goes into the cost category of doing a stream stitched integration. Also, when I left said ad server in 2016, I think I recall HLS streaming primarily supported by Apple devices. Devices like Roku’s (don’t quote me on that) didn’t support it at the time so a lot of companies looked at where the majority of their streaming was occurring and decided it wasn’t worth the hit.