Looks worth exploring, thanks mate.

As far as adverts vs. commercials, here they are two different critters. If a streaming site nests commercials, they are seen as part of the video you are streaming. An ad blocker works on external adverts, pop-ups, ad spaces on a site that use a link to the ad content. On the latter, for example, those spaces, like on a rail photo site, just show a blank; the space itself still exists.

Streaming services place commercials as part of the content itself, and an ad blocker doesn't see them to excise them as there is no external link for it to identify. Also in that same vein are sponsorship messages placed by the "influencer" within their content on Youtube.

I'm sure you're right about Youtube mining a result of their being part of Google, especially here. I'm also convinced that how these things are treated here are very different. When I was a reasonably high form of life in a UK based hobby-industry organisation, I had to quickly learned about the privacy laws both UK and EU with respect to how PII was handled, very different from the US.

It's pretty safe to say, here there is no privacy and these people are free to harvest (and lose) your PII pretty much unfettered. I can't imagine the page structure isn't different from here and there, for it's the Wild West here when it comes to privacy.

Our only options are to consciously not use sites like Faecesbook, Youtube, Twitter, Tic-toc, eBay, &c. eBay gets around the privacy legalities by having separate sites; ebay.com here and ebay.co.uk there. I can access both, they look pretty much the same, but the details are very different. I can't help but believe some of the Youtube vids we link that are blocked for you have some sort of privacy law issues (if it was a copyright issue it would be blocked for us all).

Back to the original question, ad blocking software does not block streaming services from streaming commercials as a part of their content here, where they do block adverts that have separate links to their advert.

Not unexpected in a country where lawyers and the pharmaceutical industry advertise with no restriction. GRIN!