Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question. I frequently watch pirated ESPN+ sports streams, and all of them show this “Commercial break in progress” screen when there is a commercial instead of the ads themselves. Recently all of the pirated streams have gone way down hill in quality and reliability. I was thinking about setting up my own pirated stream to help out. But as far as I can tell, there is no ad free tier for ESPN+. Does anyone know how the other streams filter out the ads so I can do the same? I don’t want to be the only stream that still has ads.

I have tried adding the ad URLs to my pihole’s blocklist, but it causes the video to start buffering when the ads come on, and it won’t recover. When I refresh the page, I get an error message saying that the video can’t be played at this time.

Is there’s some way I could redirect those URLs to some other “commercial break in progress” video instead?

  • CoffeePorter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    ESPN puts up “commercial break in progress” because they are showing ads on TV. They probably don’t show the ads on the online stream because the advertising company didn’t pay for ESPN to show it on the stream (reaching more people = more money for ESPN),so you get the message.

    • kittenmittons@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      That’s weird. I was watching a game last night on ESPN+, and instead of the “commercial break in progress” screen that I normally see when watching pirated streams, I saw commercials. I assumed that the pirated streams do something to filter out those commercials since my experience was different from theirs.