YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.