Update 1/16 - Adblock has informed BleepingComputer that its engineers fixed the problem and released ABP 3.22.1 and AB 5.17.1 on the Opera and Edge extension stores. The same versions are currently in review on the Mozilla and Chrome add-on stores, and should be made available soon.
Embedding ads into the stream would be hard to counter, but it’s far away. That would invalidate caches along the way and need extra performance to reencode the stream with the ads inserted.
That’s extra costs that are hopefully orders of magnitude above the lost ad revenue from ad blockers
Ya, but it’s hard to use logic for a company that realistically has too much money and power if they decide they want to ‘win’ against ad-blockers.
That said, I do use adblock(Ublock Origin), Sponsorblock, and I even have / use pihole in the house, and I guess being a ‘premium’ subscriber overrides their messing with ad blockers. With my TV(nvidia shield) or Browser (Firefox) I do not get any delays / problems. So at least that’s good for now.
To a certain degree, yes. If someone at Google decides to wage all-out war against ad blockers they have a good chance. But if that costs more money than it generates, odds are that someone will stop it. Google / Alphabet is publicly traded after all and that means profit above all else.