I don’t have cable and the OTA services are unreliable* so when there’s breaking news, like hurricane Ian today, I go to YouTube and look for a live stream there. When I pick a heritage broadcaster or cable service like NBC or CNN the commercial breaks are there but they’re apparently substituting promos of their own programs rather than showing paid sponsors other folks are getting.
This seems odd. It would seem to me their sales department would be proud to say, “We’ve got X viewers OTA, Y on cable, and Z online.” Is there some sort of regulation or an agreement with YT preventing this third income stream?
*With no outdoor antenna buffering is infrequent.
I think the promos are actually the default/base broadcast, and their OTA/cable affiliate stations are injecting ads over top of those, basically cutting off the original broadcast and substituting their own. That’s sort of like The Weather Channel back in the day (or maybe still?). When you’d watch it over satellite service you wouldn’t get an actual Local Forecast, instead it was just snippets of regional maps, travel forecasts, and nationwide information which was little different than the on-air segments, just without the human meteorologist. This is because local cable stations had to inject the proper local forecasts using a hardware box in their broadcast studio that was supplied by TWC. It would show all the forecast text, current conditions, local radar, almanac, extended forecast, and the narration, though I think (not positive on this one) that the music played through from the original broadcast with everything else layered on top.
I don’t know that YouTube has the sort of functionality required to overlay ads in this manner, especially for a livestream. Their typical MO is to simply pause the video where ads are injected, but that obviously doesn’t work with a livestream. I’m sure they have a way to blank out the audio and video underneath, but getting the timing right seems like it’d be a challenge without being able to receive what I assume are anachronistic broadcast flags and other analog-ish metadata that’s meant to tell studio equipment when a break is starting and ending, all with predetermined lengths of time and such. It seems like it’d be fraught with problems, but also it would be Google/YouTube injecting those ads at that point, so CNN or NBC would only be getting a cut of that revenue (I think it’s around 55%), so it may just not be worth the hassle.
But a national broadcast – either OTA or cable – wouldn’t attract national advertisers?
Also, YT does have the ability to run local ads – I see them all the time, especially lately with Governor and Senate races, both being competitive here in Arizona, but also “regional” [manufacturer] auto dealer ads and even specialty retailers like floor tile shops and a metal dealer bragging about their inventory.
It is imperfect. I saw an ad for a restaurant in a city I’d never heard of. Looking it up online it turned out it was in Michigan.
This is odd. Presumably you know how to use an ad-blocker add-on with your browser? I don’t think I have ever seen a commercial on YouTube.
This is watching on a smart TV. AFAIK no ad-blockers are available for that, unlike the desktop.
An ad blocker won’t remove ads that are part of the original live stream broadcast. If they could, at best they’d just blank out the screen until the main broadcast starts back up again.