this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you're saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: "here's a frame", "okay, I watched that frame", "okay, here's the next frame".
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn't work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it's cached.
But if it's the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn't be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn't have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they've sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We'd be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.