Can we continually have a Twitch anti-adblock update thread every single day or two?

The chance of major adblockers adjusting their functionality just because Twitch has developed this one "new" ad product are insanely low - especially if you consider how most adblockers work in general.

  1. They block/remove DOM elements
  2. They block http requests to ad networks which serve the ad image/video/text file (using URL blacklists/whitelists)
  3. They block the scripts which create the actual DOM elements/the scripts that make the actual http request (also using URL blacklists/whitelists)

SureStream mixes ads into the the HLS stream/m3u8 playlist using the SCTE-35 standard which itself is used to signal ad insertion into transport streams. (also used by Google Ad Manager and Amazon's live video processing service)

Reasons why you might not see ads:

  1. Ads are heavily localized, sometimes there are just no ads available
  2. Not all features are always rolled out to everyone, especially on a huge site like Twitch
  3. Twitch does heavy A/B testing

I've posted the most efficient way to block new SureStream ads in the other thread, just reposting it here for visibility.

This chrome/firefox extension will filter/edit the m3u8 playlist/HLS stream to remove any advertisments detected through SCTE-35 flags.

/r/Twitch Thread