This would make replays or scrubbing count as additional views. To fix that, they would need some kind of set to uniquely store all clients, and that‘s questionable from a security and moral point of view, even for YouTube.

local cache should handle scrubbing

No such thing for YT videos. Official player will refetch video chunks if you so much as rewind 5 minutes back.

And that is incredibly annoying for the user and a problem Youtube should fix.

If YouTube stored the entire video in a cache people would yell and scream about that. Oh, I’ve got 2TB of YouTube cache that didn’t get cleaned properly, how annoying.

Well Im a liar. Checked just now and it changed since last time I was looking into this.

cache-control private, max-age=11722 (~3 hours) date Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT expires Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT

it once again lands in browser cache. I remember a moment when it returned no-cache.

We are back to situation where:

- google doesnt get any info if user with adblocker keeps rewinding in that ~3hour window

- player refetches if you pause for few hours and come back, or decide to rewind 3 hour video to watch again

- your SSD is hammered with gigabytes of useless browser cache writes - might be good idea for Extension overwriting those headers to no-store/max-age=0

I would be surprised if browsers actually cashed the entirety of videos, even if the cash policy allows for it. That does seem like a way to thrash SSD.

They did before switch to no-cache, and I bet they are back at it now. Chrome used to roughly write as much as I watched at ~2-3GB per hour.

Scrubbing is a video editing term for going forwards and backwards over a video to find specific frames and editing them

and YT 'multiple times throughout a video playback' client side endpoint has been tracking this for years reporting every single minute of video you watched, thats what is powering Most Replayed Feature (scroll bar graph showing popular moments in every video)

But then they’d have to report significantly lower CPM’s to content creators.

Lower CPMs, but it would be so easy to game that creators would all have trillions of views.

Indeed. It's essentially malware.

At least BonziBuddy sang for me.

ah that takes me back, going to the Uni computers and have all them ridden with malware and browser bars so thick you could barely browse the net

but still you could go home and have a reasonable setup, there is no escape from the current "open" interwebs

They already do something like this - some videos have an indicator for how many times a chunk of a video is played.

Plus that would make cheating on traffic really bandwidth expensive

Not for the cheater. You’d still buy 1m views on some shady site, armies of bots on hacked devices/routers would still pull down the steams at no cost to the bad guys.