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Trimming Television to Sell More Ads
gambit3 writes: "Tech TV has an article about a device called a "Digital Time Machine", that does something called "Time Trimming", which is basically a way to cut single frames from different scenes in TV programs, which, over the course of a 30 minute program, can add up to 30 seconds, which is, incidentally, the perfect length to add ANOTHER commercial."
Just what we need, more bad ads. How much will they charge for this one at the Superbowl?
It compresses the audio, taking out blank space, to fit in between 30 sec - 2 min an hour. Rush Limbaugh among others have blasted it for ruining the listener's experience.
sulli
RTFJ.
There was a story about this a few days ago.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
This particular machine has been around for a long time. I can remember seeing it advertised in Video Systems or TV Technology or some such trade mag for a long time. Apparently, it has been in use for quite some time (think years).
How long before we see the blip verts (a la Max Headroom) make their network debut?
Let's degrade the already not-that-great video quality from broadcast television!
::sigh::
Though, I suppose it won't matter in a few years when we all have HDTV over DSL and a free DMCA Skullfucker 4000 Market-Reaving Device free in the box
::hugs his LDs and shortwave::
--- Do you believe in the day?
Its an application of inter-frame interpolation. They've been doing it for years.
Everytime you watch a movie and it starts with that little stop watch symbol next to text that says something like "This movie has been modified for time" its in use.
No one these days has enough time to do anything they want to do anyway... why not do something useful with that 30 seconds? Perhaps this means you'll be able to get more done during commercial breaks now. The whole point of the system is that you won't notice if the show is made 30 seconds shorter anyway... so will you?
Or, you could just not watch TV and gain 1/2 and whole hours at a time!
NPR had a spot on the radio equivalent that went by the name of C.A.S.H. If I remember right it would just speed things up rather than drop information. I think they first tested it out on rush limbaugh, and he was rather upset as well. ha!
Given 24 frames / second, they're going to be cutting 720 frames / show. That's actually a lot of footage. Weak sauce.
I didn't think it was possible to get more advertising in. Hell, a round of commercials in 24 is four minutes long. Yet another reason why it's time to record and _NEVER_ watch live TV again. Fast-forwarding is a marvelous thing.
Isn't 33% of the showtime for commercials enough already? I guess not.
So which frames are they cutting, and do they plan to cut the audio too? I suppose during moments of intense silence, cutting a 24/th of a second of audio won't be a big problem, but still.
I just hope its not something that chirps..or is otherwise obvious what they're doing.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Just like the software they were (are?) using on Rush Limbaugh's show to cut out periods of silence between sentences and words.
This sort of thing worries me because I feel like we're losing some of our good old American entrepenurial spirit more and more all the time. It no longer seems to matter if you have a good idea, make a better product, or do something truly innovative, rather companies seem to think that the bigger the marketing department the better the company. I think sooner or later the consumer will just get pissed off at the ever-increasing advertising in all places at all times, and hopefully get back to spending her money at the companies that produce something truly innovative and superior (as opposed to just the image of something truly innovative and superior).
Here in Canada, we have the CRTC which regulates how many minutes of commercials a Canadian station can show within the period of 30 minutes. On top of that, stations also have requirements for what ratio of Canadian programming to foreign programming can be shown during primetime hours, etc. Stations which violate these licenses enough times likely won't be renewed.
Basically, this device would sell up here about as well as bottled yellow snow.
those confounded X-10 pop-under ads seem slightly less annoying now, especially since they aren't thirty seconds long. And, on the whole, if it were a matter of having to close another X-10 add every half-hour or watching a nauseating thirty second comercial, I'll take the X-10 add.
...ZeoSync and eventually we'll all be able to watch a 30 minute TV program in 30 seconds without missing a thing.
If the show is running in NTSC, they could probably get a lot more out of it than 30 seconds.
The problem with these types of "automagic" machines is that it can never do it perfectly. HP has a device that fits in 1U on a rack and it will force video into your programmed specifications. We used to use it when transferring rented videos into an online editor so that we could cut preview spots together for DTV. The problem is that the video usually looked like crap after it was transferred. I'm sure it didn't make a good case for purchasing the pay-per-view version of it.
Maybe this technology could be used for GOOD! Instead of adding 30 seconds of commercials, they could squeeze one or two more jokes in the the Drew Cary show? Or one more idiotic plot twist into the X-Files?
You guys are always naysaying! Why don't you come up with an invention like inward sing--- oh wait, wrong rant....
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
They could use this to cut out frames from other commercials! Also, isn't there black space between commercials as it it? They could just cross fade everything into everything else, Just like on the more annoying radio stations. No wonder I don't own a TV! ::alan
If only I had a patent.
Each year, I prepare for the Super Bowl. Not that I like the Super Bowl, but apart from knowing the score at each quarter, the only knowledge you need to prove that you watched the game is what commercials were shown.
After programming my VCR to record the game, I watch the amusing commercials and fast forward through the game itself. This new-fangled "Time Machine" just gives you the illusion of actually watching the show between ads.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
What kind of soulless, greed-driven monster came up with this? I mean, what kind of person do you have to be to work in television? This isn't rhetoric, or hyperbole; I seriously just can't fathom the mental processes of the people who spend their lives doing this kind of stuff.
Think about it - it's commonplace now to re-edit shows for syndication. Lots of times they cut out a whole gag on The Simpsons to get more commercial time. If they can garner the same amount just by removing the occasional barely-perceptible frame of deadwood, I say go for it. On the other hand, if this is implemented as making every transition between scenes sudden and jolting, it will be much less preferable.
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
My GeForce2 does this all of the time!
Don't look at this as being "another commercial" - look at it as "overclocking your TV" - just think, that's thirty seconds less time per show you have to watch, just by skipping over it with your Tivo.
Heck, I've often wanted the ability to do just this - compress a TV show I want to see so as to be better able to fit it into my time.
Now, if we could just compress the time wasted by laugh tracks....
www.eFax.com are spammers
http://www.uniontrib.com/news/computing/20011108-1 353-compressedgame.html>
Instead of chopping out frames and using the space for an obvious commercial, why don't they just interleave single-frame ads into the content? No one would ever notice, and we'd all start buying Stuff(TM) right away.
Television content is called "programming" for a reason! Subliminal advertising is a cult practice.
I know for a fact TV stations aren't easy to keep in business. Just because biggies like KTLA and the like can stay afloat, doesn't mean the other 90% of the smaller stations can afford to keep up with business. Commericials make up most of a TV stations revenue. The rest is done with making commercials or whatever side business they have. 30 seconds isn't that noticable in your life. The more money the station makes the better everything is. Better shows can be bought, better equipment for news casts, ETC. Better stuff will make you the viewer happier.
They employed something similar, or this device during a football game somewheres. Now, heres a good question, what happens when you take something thats happening live, and start cutting out frames? It gets desynched very very quickly, people were freaking out, plays were happening on the radio before they saw it on 'live' TV. The NFL spasmed on the station that did this, and any other station even attempting to do something like this is fearful of the NFL and a army of Lawyers.
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
s/images/scenes/
s/hear/read/
s/period of time/number of words/
Is it just me, or does that start to sound alot like Coles Notes?
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
This is only vaguely on topic, but what I don't understand is why no PVR maker offers this feature - let me adjust the playing speed from -100% to +100% (possibly faster), pitch shifting the sound back to normal (just like most voice-mail systems let you do now).
I'd be more keen to watch some things if they'd take a lot less time - I think I might not even skip ads if I was watching at 200% normal speed.
Am I wrong, and Tivo or RePlay offers this feature already?
.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just thought - what do the actors who's delivery is being altered by this think? Since I know of at least one SAG member who reads this board regularly, maybe we can get some insight what the pros think?
www.eFax.com are spammers
James Gleick brings this up often in his book entitled "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" It's an interesting read, focusing on the way society seems to be so time-oriented, losing sight of the truly meaningful things.
personally, advertising has become background noise ... i mentally "tune out" when commercials come on and close pop-up windows when they get in the way. now if you excuse me i have a craving for fabric softner
blipverts are on the way.
--
Banned from Moderating?
Just shorten the commercials instead. Duh. :)
Imagine working for a movie studio taking older films and time compressing them to make them more palatable to today's market. Punch up slow scenes with digital effects such as camera jitter, zoom and cut, or any of a dozen very accepted post-modern camera techniques to increase the cut pace.
I can't take credit for the idea but when I read this in a science fiction novel years ago, it really made me wonder what the average attention span will be in twenty or thirty years.
In the article they said they can make a program shorter by certain frames...on the other hand, I remember in the good old days where advertising would be done by inserting single frames on periodic occassions throughout the screening of the program.
Check this link.
I remember in '86 or '87 seeing a program on TV (ironically) about speeding up films on TV to make room for advertising. They had a nice comparison between Humphry Bogart smoking in "Casablanca" at "true speed" and "on speed" (weeeeee!). The latter looked ... unreal - but just in direct comparison mind you.
'Course - I have no link, because them there were (gasp) pre-web days.
Kind of an obvious use of vid-tech though, innit?
yes, we have no bananas
I no more buy products because some clown makes me laugh, or some half naked girlie makes me excited. So what is the difference when instead of 'directly' selling me something, they are pushing some agenda that must use a fantasy environment (the fantasy environment created by ANY book, film, theater, etc) to make it sound plausable?
As long as Discovery, et al don't fall prey to this I imagine I will not even notice it.
KDKA did this / does this with the steelers. If you're a god fearing 'stillers' fan you watch the game on TV but listen to Meyran and boys on the radio. A few months back, while doing this I realized that there was about a 20 second gap between what Meyran was screaming about and what was on tv. Needless to say the radio was ahead... So I kept the head phones on and was calling the plays left and right for my friends who were just watching the tv . (Sacrelig) They thought I was psychic. But anyhoo. Others noticed it too and I believe the station got in alot of trouble for that.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Sorry, the MPAA/DMCA willl be on your ass for reverse engineering the storyline of Kate & Leopold.
I have to wonder how they cover the discontinuities if they cut whole frames' worth of audio, or how close they can sync with the video if they cut more opportunistically.
Clem.
the only ad that has ever annoyed me is that ThinkGeek hey! wear our hoodies! ad when reading Slashdot
unless you're one of the people that thinks the ads are usually better than the crap programs themselves
The device itself and another story for the article.
Shh.
Perhaps Slashdot could use this technology to put another banner ad up:
gabit3 wites: "Tech TV has an aricle about a deice called a "Digital Time Machine, that does something caled "Time Trimming", hich is basically a way to cut ingle frams from different scenes in TV programs, whic, over the course of a 30 minute program, can add up to 3 seconds, which is, incidentaly, the perfect length to add NOTHER commecial."
I'd prefer it to drop a few frames here and there than drop whole scenes.
... some scenes had been removed - it was quite noticeable (and irritating).
:-)
I noticed this scene-dropping one day on a re-run of "the simpsons"
But still, yet another ad can be squeezed in. I can't wait.
A few more years, and broadcast TV everywhere will be all shot to hell. The only channels left worth watching in Australia are the ABC (which doesn't have ads, being gov't funded),and SBS (who at least lumps their ads together at the end of each show). The other 3 networks are crap, with over-sensationalised news (how many more "shocking","horrific" news stories can there be?) and it seems more ads than content.
Who's up for making the next slashdot on the internet2 with video comments instead? Count me in
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
If TiVo is using MPEG2 transport stream frames for transmission (and storage) there is a clock reference in the stream that would take some effort to "fast forward" since its sync'ed to a 27MHz clock. Not that it can't be done, its just a bit of work that no one has thought of yet...
I guess that fast forward could play with the clock, but a variable clock is what we are trying to avoid (clock wander and long term degredation keep me up at night doing simulations...). My guess is from the technological point of view its feasible, just not desirable...sorry.
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
I despise laugh tracks.
-I- myself KNOW when to laugh.
I KNOW when something is funny...or not.
People who need these over obvious cues
(for a "suggested response")
have NO sense of humor to call their own!
Laugh tracks are the sole reason we have so many god aweful sitcoms...
if you tell them to laugh,(subconsciously) they will laugh...
(the reason for so many UNfunny shows)
The Simpsons/Futurama/Family Guy have no laugh tracks....why? because they're FUNNY on their own!
- adam
If you want to know more you can read the canoe article or read about what radio has been doing for a while (cash) in NYTimes.
//m
I just had an epiphany! What if we had the option to pay a flat fee per month for more than basic air reception service?... oh yeah, it's called a CABLE BILL.
But wait, with this service it is atleast 1/3 unsolicited forced "spam!"
I understand commercials are a necessary evil that we have become acoustomed to, but why can't I have the option to pay a little bit extra for no commercials. Here's how I think the ideal situation would work...
Most television programs are filmed where approx. ten minutes of every thirty minutes are for commercial sponsors. Why not play the programs back to back, and be able to broadcast three episodes in the place of two episodes with commercials. Hopefully the concept would catch the attention of the masses and have a wide subscription clientele to make up the lost revenue brought in from commercials.
I realize that there wouldn't be much incentive for any parties other than the consumer, but I can dream - can't I?
Just wait until they start airing the Blipverts!
So another company has been awarded a patent for a device that has existed for more than a decade. Only time will tell when they sue Lexicon for enabling 1" type-C machines with the same capability. Or does the fact that it handled digitally make the idea completely different? This is not novel, folks. The shifting up-and-down you've been seeing for years on TBS SuperStation is time compression. And before you jump on the "delay" feature, that has been done too with even older "quad" format. (Klunky, but it worked.) I'd love to see Lexicon go after these guys. RCA can't because their "delay" was well over 20 years ago.
Playing a 30fps program at 30.5fps will not harm the average user experience, and it means Enterprise is shorter! Combined with cutting the theme tune and credits you can nearly get 2 episodes on a VCD!
How many half hour shows actually have 30 minutes of the show to compress? Aren't most shows only 20-24 minutes anyway? That means you're not going get a full commercial in every show unless they are going to compress commercials as well. Which means there are probably going to be some upset advertisers.
My DVD player lets me watch movies at twice the normal speed... wait for the next generation of tv shows and commercials. 10 minutes of super speed show, and 20 minutes of ssllooww speed commercials.
I have no problem with advertising. If I get something of quality for more or less free, i expect to have to watch something I may or may not find interesting (And i'm of the mind that i'd rather it be targeted, than not.) Now, i'm not an expert on economics or anything, but it seems to me slashdot is a -tad- too jumpy when it comes to stuff like this. As mentioned a bit earlier, they've been doing this on radio for ages.
[Note, the below doesn't neccesarily state my views, just an interpretation of the circumstances. The comment may or may not be based in rational thought; The statement has been engineered for slashdot audiences].
Has anyone else noticed that, if you havent entered your own URL, your url is set to http://slashdot.org/? Now, in a way, that could be interpreted as slashdot branding your comment. Say, for instance, if your post was quoted somewhere, in its entirety, that would be analogus to having one of those annoying "Come read at www.yahoo.com!" banners at the bottom of a mail. Doesn't seem very slashdot-like to me. How about have it default to, say, NOTHING like it did a few months ago.. or better yet, to the slashdot meta thread?
$0.02 refundable w/ $15.00 restocking fee.
I saw a segment on TV about this months ago. The machine looks for consecutive frames where not much has changed and removes them.
If they only used it on half hour crap sit-coms and talk shows it wouldn't be so bad. But It seems like it would ruin scenes from classic movies where a director has purposely inserted a pregnant pause or an uncomfortable silence in the dialogue or an actors face frozen in horror.
But hey! If it makes someone a few more bucks then what the hell. Maybe they could frame the Mona Lisa with LCD panels and sell advertising on them.
The number of ads has kept going up and up. I don't know about you guys, but it just makes me flip channels more. It makes for distracting TV watching, since I end up surfing for something new every commercial break.
time compressing audio and video to make it not sound/look strange is actually pretty computationally expensive to do in real-time. But you're right, this would be a pretty kick ass feature. I'll bet that they'll have it once we have fast enough embedded processors to do it.
Realistically 90% of people are going to put up with any crap you force on them, but still, this might make a lot of the type of people who read /. give up on live TV.
I also think it is silly to argue that no one will notice... I agree that it will be subtle, but think about it, .5/23= about 2.2% of the show, and that's assuming it was still a 23 min long show. Don't tell me you can hear compression artifacts in a 160kbps MP3, but you can't tell that the show is 2% faster. Doesn't break my heart with many of the shows they are playing, but 2% could very well have an effect on the timing of a dramatic scene in a good show or movie, and I think the networks are far more likely to use this in addition to and not instead of cutting scenes.
Well, it's a good thing many good TV series are coming out on DVD. And just keep watching Cartoon Network, since they have to follow the 6-min commercial limit ;)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I'd be really pissed off at the amount of screwing around with programs that the TV companies do. I mean, you spend days assembling your film so the story reads just right, the pacing is perfect, and it all hangs together and *feels* right.
Then some idiot comes along and starts chopping bits out all over the place. If the program would have worked 30 seconds faster, it would have been *made* 30 seconds faster, and had an extra few scenes. Surely?
- MugginsM
Whenever I watch a movie on FX, it says "Time Compressed" I always assumed that meant they dropped frames. Was I wrong?
"He who laughs last is usually the dumbest kid on the block." - John Lennon
YEA!
Every episode of "The Simpsons" broadcast in syndication has a few scenes cut for insertion of extra commercials. I wouldn't mind if they ran this process on each episode if it meant they were able to give us back those scenes.
Of course, they'll probably do it anyway just to add *more* commercials, and save the deleted scenes for the DVDs, damn their moneygrubbing souls. Mr. Burns would be proud.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
In fact, it's very common.
You will see moves on TV that are "Time Compressed".. (they yanked frames to very slightly speed it up).
Radio does it.. songs play a wee bit faster in order to fit in more commerical time...
and so on, and so forth.
Time compression of spots is nothing new. Broadcasters have been doing this for several decades. Clipping out the frames of video isn't the method that had been used in the past.
The professional grade videotape decks (VTRs) have the ability to play back tapes and variable speed without affecting the video adversely. One VTR plays the tape at a slightly increased speed while the other VTR records it. Viola, a time compressed tape.
There is the issue of the change in audio pitch due to the playback speed. In some cases where the compression is limited, they simply leave the audio slightly off pitch. In the case where they really crunch the video, they need to use a pitch coverter (traditionally the Lexicon model) to fix the audio.
Broadcasters are high tech guys that have been hacked television while most computer geeks were still playing Lode Runner on their Apple ][s and Atari 800s...
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Wouldn't the people who sell their programs (for whom I cant think of a name for at this time of night) to TV broadcasting companies not like this little bit of technology very much? Would they be able to sue if a TV station used it to modify, although only very slighty, the program which they were meant to air?
For the viewer there would probably be no noticeable difference unless you closely examined the whole unedited program all the way through beforehand.. but for the big companies selling their shows it seems like it could be another chance to sue someone and get some extra spending money.
The Slash summary is just misleading as usual.
These devices are used in order to compress a program into the right amount of time so you CAN put the required amount of commericals in.
It's not at *all* a way to 'scam' the consumer into watching more commercials.. just a way to 'shorten' a show so it fits your schedule.
Canadian stations use this too, you can bet on it.
Lemme get this straight .. they raise the price of cable so they can show us more commercials.
... i'm tired of all the ad's EVERYWHERE I LOOK.
That's just about as good as all the commercials we now get to watch at movie theatre's.
genius!
I would love it if tv in NA was more like a lot of europe. No commercials (sometimes 1 1-2 min break) during the program, and the rest get shown at the end. So nice! You get to watch the show without interruption, and you still see the commercials. Or, if you actually need to check e-mail you have time.
... sigh
I realised I wasn't watching TV much any more. I paid a little more attention and realised that when the ads came on, I'd get up to go and do something else, and rarely remembered to come back. I think that's when the ad/program ratio crossed my magic point.
And, I haven't really missed it.
Sure, I still watch some shows, (Buffy, Time Team, etc) but it takes a conscious effort to remember to come back in time to catch the next bit of program.
I guess I must be fairly unique in this, since if everyone did it, the TV stations would have to start actually showing *content* again.
I'm in NZ, and the ads still take up less time than in other places - I've occasionally had a tape sent over to me from the US, and found it completely unwatcheable from all the channel promos, ads, screwing around with episodes, etc. I have trouble understanding why the Americans are so addicted to TV as a nation - perhaps it's similar to the cocaine addict who doesn't realise he's getting 95% talcum powder nowadays, just that he needs to buy more and more for it to work.
- MugginsM
The cinemas in Hong Kong would run the western movies at about 22-24 frames/second to speed up the movies. They would also cut out scenes where there was a lot of "dialog". God forbid anyone would really want to listen to the movie. :)
but do you use Linux? If not, you're just a wannabe f4gg0r.
---
Lord of the Things: One Thing to Rule Them All!
The harvester and packager of the product is the huge machine which keeps the TV screen saturated with images targeted to specific groups.
The consumer of this product is the advertiser.
As long as you keep that in mind, all of this makes perfect sense.
The TV isn't on for YOU. It's on for them.
why can't I have the option to pay a little bit extra for no commercials I think it's called PBS...
I guess it's because I'm not in "advertising", but I don't understand how advertisers think that more is better. I, and I'd imagine most others, have a fixed amount of money to spend on things. How much money I spend IS NOT proportional to the number of ads that I see.
This is the reason that I don't understand the complaints that advertisers have with TiVo-like devices... it's as if they think I'll spend more money if I see more ads... and that's just not the case.
Advertisers are just going to have to do better at being that one ad that "sticks" in my mind.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Often editors will go through a movie, or show, or commercial, and shave frames to the point where everything is still intelligible. It's not called "time trimming," it's called "frame fucking."
I suppose this will upset the producers of our fine television shows. Image Matt Groening filing a lawsuit for 30 seconds of more Simpson fun!
I don't watch much TV "live" any more, I tape most of it, and watch it later, skipping commercials (except ones which look interesting). (Yeah, I should get a Tivo.) Anyway, I'm used to being able to watch 30-minute programs in about 21 or 22 minutes, and 1-hour shows in about 43 minutes. For some shows (lighter fluff like "Friends"), I wouldn't mind being able to speed it up another couple of minutes. (With other shows, of course, I'd want them just as they were originally, sans commercials.)
The difference is, I wanna be the one with my hand on the time-dilation dial, not the networks.
first techtv writes it on the 23rd, then abcnews (mind the ads, here...) gets it from them on the 24th, and now slashdot 3 days after even that.
Not that it was a bad thing to get that stinker over faster.
This feature would be a great addition to Tivo, with a speed control on the remote to let you adjust the pace of a show. If the writers only had 17 minutes of script to fill the 23 minutes of a sitcom (sans commercials and credits), then speeding it up would give you the ability to compensate for the director's instructions to slow the dialogue and extend the laugh tracks.
Most shows could be watched in half the airtime, leaving more of our precious lifetimes to read /.
When you could splice in some... Tyler Durden.
I've decided to just about completely quit watching TV anymore. The program time to commercial time ratio just sucks. Our local cable TV is Times-Warner and I've been timing this ratio and over the vast majority of all channels except the premium movie channels, it goes like this: 8 minutes of the program followed by 4 to 5 minutes of commercials, another 8 minutes of program followed by 4 to 5 minutes of commercials, etc, etc, etc. Hell, even the infomercials are now getting this treatment... no more that 8 minute segments of program material followed by at least 4 minutes of spot ads. Blechhhhh!!!!
I use ANUX.
It is a full Linux distribution... Up your ass!
Perhaps TV shows can add random, unnoticable artifacts to the video to prevent this device from working? (the artifacts mean frames are no longer duplicate).
--jquirke
Does anyone know if Fox uses this on Simpsons in syndication?
There seems to be some weird artifacts on many of these. About 1.5 times a second, the whole screen appears to shift slightly. It's like one of the interlaced fields is dominant and then it flips.
This is really annoying to me, and I have seen it on multiple TVs. It might happen on other shows, but it is very noticable in animation.
Anyone?
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
Since this device is cutting frames to make the program shorter, what will happen with the audio? How will they get the audio to sync up to the video if some of the video is missing. If they cut out 30 seconds of video from a program, then by the end of the show wouldn't the audio be 30 off? American shows would start to look like old, poorly dubbed Jackie Chan movies.
Though this 'Digital Time Machine' technology allows for the complete opposite type of activity, reading this article immediately reminded me of the scene from 'Fight Club' in which Tyler Durden painstakingly "splices single frames of pornography into otherwise innocuous family-films..."
"So, when the snooty cat and the courageous dog meet in reel three, that's when you'll catch Tyler's contribution."
While I suppose this practice of trimming frames to facilitate the creation of additional advertisement time is a bit less immoral than Tyler's pursuits, I don't find it to be any more forthright or any less dubious in nature!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
The could start using that embedded flash crap that shows up on yahoo and other sites that covers your screen. Or possibly a PiP window with just video commercials.
Oh yeah, I also surf "FrestMeat" daily.
this is the ugliest site i have seen in a while...and all this is from the company that sells a $90k device to TV stations?
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Obviously none of those liberal talk show hosts would ever do anything like this.
If this were applied to books, and I could have superfluous adjectives removed, then maybe I would only need a couple hours to read a Robert Jordan novel! ;^)
But seriously, I had a class in college where the more book reports I wrote, the better my grade. I already had a "C" in the class, so I put it off until the end and had my final exams behind me. Then I grabbed the first book, and read the first sentence of the first paragraph on the right-hand page. Remember that a good writer introduces a paragraph with a "Topic Sentence". This was just taking advantage of that. There were a few parts which caught my interest as I was flipping through, and I read the surrounding pages in depth. Voila! I had the context of the entire book, and details on several specifics. Another hour later and I had written my first report. By the time the night was through, I'd brought my grade from a "C" to an "A"!
The flip side of this high-content bandwidth is sensory overload. I'm already running into this with the increasing onslaught of advertisements. I recall a time when the only ads were in newspapers, on the radio or TV, or on billboards. Maybe that's why I so enjoy taking a walk in the woods or relaxing on a beach away from all the noise and confusion.
The remote control is also kind of pointless when you only have one channel.
In England, the BBC operates how many? Three channels? Most Americans with basic cable get 40-50 channels and don't have to pay an extra tax for their TVs. Then, I just get a Tivo and fast forward through the commercials.
God bless America!
TV is for nursing homes and coma wards. If you are blessed with more cortical activity than a salad bar, turn off the tube and go do something useful.
OMG, that Linux penquine is SO CUTE!!!! I COULD JUST GOBBLE IT RIGHT UP!!!! thank you newmovie toll for explainig why nonoe of my submiessions get posted!111 I knew those slashydots were up to no good.
If you look at the current trends more and more advertising is being thrust at us. Add this and Cable/sattalite TV with 100 demographicly differenciated channels and they both are running ads they sell on top of ads that are sold by the broadcasting stations so the broadcast ads aren't even being seen. You'll see the real problem that is going to crop up in the not too distant future. It's only a matter or time when enought comsumer backlash builds up and people just aren't interested in watching 20 minutes of a show with 10 minutes of ads for every half hour show. We aren't far from that right now. I think the current ratio is 22/8 or worse. The content of the shows will also deminish in quality and just not interest viewers anymore. People are also spending more in front of the computer and not watching tv or only watching during the content and not the ads. Ads are and will in the future become less and less effective. Tivo and DVR will make this matter even worse because you won't even see the ads(dependant on lawsuits). :)
What does this add up to? In the next 5-6 years tv will go to crap with minimal budget shows with only 70% content and 30% ads(at best). Over the next few years you'll see tons of ads that are "Get in your face." The number of ads you will see will increase dramaticly as will your tendancy to forget nearly all of them, no matter how good they are just because you see so many. Then there will be a period of change. What that change is I don't know. It depends on future technologies (UWB? hehehe), lawsuits and how much they pay politicians to enact laws that are beneficial to them.
I don't think we are seening the beginning of the end of TV, but it there will be a radical change in the next few years.
Did Dave Sim do Cerebus?
Hmm...
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Try this sig instead...
Lord of the Rings! One ring to rule them all!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to attract beautiful buxom blondes with my beverage choice or to buy the toys and clothes that will make my children love me. Okay, I don't have any blonde friends or children, but I didn't before either...
-Kevin
IMHO, there aren't enough ads on tv. What we as a consumer society needs are more ads and less entertainment. I yearn for the days when the advertisement is interrupted by 30 seconds of entertainment.
-
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Yes! This would be an excellent feature. Please request this from TiVo - they are asking for feature suggestions. I requested this very feature a few months ago, and if enough people chime in with the same request it might just catch their attention.
To answer your question, my guess is that no PVRs offer this feature simply because PVRs have only been around for a relatively short amount of time and they just haven't had enough time to add all the features that somebody would want yet.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Since when does randomly removing frames from a film involve physics or Einstein? They aren't slowing down time or anything here.
What's going on? Are they removing frames?
I've even started noticing it on video rentals.
Since it seems this doesn't bother too many people other than myself, I guess the networks will get even more brazen in the future. Who knows what else they'll come up with to sacrifice quality for a few more bucks. Oh well, I suppose it's had a good effect for me personally in that I don't watch TV any more because of it, but I sure do miss it sometimes.
Wow, people actually watch commercials still? Don't they know about TIVO???
:)
I beat my meat several times daily.
---
Lord of the Things: One Thing to Rule Them All!
No- really, think about it
Ads are perfect for radio and public television, because there aren't subscription fees. I myself, however, pay about $30/mo for basic cable service to my house, and if I wanted the whole shebang, I'd be paying upwards of $50-$60/mo. Now lets do some math-
Time Warner-12.7 million subscribers
Directv-10.7 million subscribers
Dish Networks-Around 5.5 million subscribers
Total (selected companies)-28.9 million subscribers
Now, if we are conservative and say that your average joe only pays $35/mo, then that means that the cash flow into the TV business is about 1.01 billion dollars. In reality, this number is much higher (I'm guessing around 5-6 billion in income per month), because there are more subscribers (I only know of three providers off the top of my head, and I live in the north east), and these subscribers pay a larger fee for their service (about $40-$60). Now, with that much money going into the programming biz each month, do we need commercials?
Maby I should put it this way- I sure as hell don't pay $30/mo to watch commercials half the damn time. Cable should be free if we're forced to watch commercials.
I am looking forward to 30 minute baseball games this spring! Wait, does that mean that there will be 2 1/2 hours of commercials per game?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Hasn't this been done with radio for quite some time? Some stations play songs or whatever slightly faster then normal in order to add a couple more commercials throughout the day. There are a couple here in Dallas that I know do it, takes a keen ear to tell, because is the engineer at the station isn't good the pitch will either be higher or the tempo of the songs is just a little off.
Who really needs television anyway? I've got Slashdot and plenty of other entertainment (read porn) right here on the internet.
Usually if I do watch TV, I've got my laptop there too so I can browse during the commercials, so it really doesn't bother me if they add one more.
This only effects the losers that still spend half of their productive free time bolted in front of the tube.
If you are stuck infront of the tube then you deserve what you get! Enjoy the tube!
jesus
That sweet. Protect your brain, and respect your Nation. TO me, whats the point of HDTV if their gonna drop the frames below the current 29.9fps???
I was watching the Twin Peaks season 1 episodes on dvd last week I noticed they averaged 48-49 minutes while the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes average 42-43 minutes. Twin Peaks aired in 1990 and Buffy in 1997 so in the course of 7 years or so tv shows they have cut out 6 minutes of content for more commercials. And now in 2002 we will lose another 30 seconds of content per half hour sigh...
...so now my TV is going to look like a 56k modem real player connection before too long. 20 Frames? nah, they only need 7!
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Luckily theres alt.binaries.futurama
Pan rocks! I love how it finds all of the file pieces and puts them together.
Seems almost a year ago someone at work ( I work for a local fox news show) was talking about similar technology, except it actually played the show at a slightly higher speed, and lowered the pitch of the sound to compensate. It was enough to make the show significantly shorter, yet people didn't notice the small speed increase.
But since TV only displays at a certain FPS, I suppose this method might actually "drop" a frame here and there.. I'm really not sure.
Although, I wish I could do this with our news show, possibly run it twice the speed so I could go home early... But I can't, live tv sucks.
Klowner
I think the science fiction novel you're refering to is David Brin's Earth. It's a good book... from the site, it appears that there might be a movie based upon it.
He also wrote the The Postman, which we all know was a horrendous movie, the book was better, though.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Making time from cutting frames shouldn't be a bid deal. I think advertisers should shutup and let everything be cut, including ads. Just think how much more useless information you could absorb from TV if everything were cut. It would be escpecially great on education films so students don't drown in a sea of their own drool.
-=-=- I don't suck... you blow. -=-=-
do -1 posts not get archived? that sucks, a lot of my classics are missing
This is just great...now, we have sacraficed video quality and have to put up with just that many more ads. What really tees me off is we pay alotta money for DigitalTV and we still get ads on the DigitalTV channels -- even the 5 HBO channels. What a rip.
Pretty soon, they'll be saying, "We now interrupt your regularly scheduled ad to go to a program". Or, "We now interrupt your adomercial for some ads".
We need to go back to the days before the radio waves were controlled by the FCC...no control at all...there'd be no ads, and diverse viewpoints would get out. Access to particular frequencies would be determined by a LAN-like system...if two people requested the same frequency at the same time, their machines would each resend the request after a random time interval...whoever got it first would go.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Not described is another technique to make commercials more affective on watchers: make the shows fucking shit so commercials are a god send.
Isn't that the muscle guy that sells stuff for Radio Shack? Doesn't he play the Tick? Talk about living the part....
Here is my idea, remember it well so you can dispute patents later.
Every station overlays shows these days with their logo in the bottom right.
Sell advertising overlays.
Imagine how much Coca-cola would pay to have their logo in the top right of your screen during the super bowl.
Its just so simple and obvious...there must be some catch somewhere or someone would already be doing it.
...is the sound of viewers abandoning network television in droves, for this same exact type of behavior.
Keep it up, I'm sure the remaining half-dozen viewers won't mind.
Paramount has been playing all sorts of tricks with the UPN Voyager and Enterprise feeds at least since Mid to Late 1999, It's old news to me.
The interesting thing here is that the Enterprise Feeds sent to Canada, on Telstar 5 TP 16 for broadcast say on A-Channel don't have this
What we know is that this is lucurative, and people who can't compare the two will not know what it is that they are missing.
I suppose that these people will have to get a new name.
The purpose of the TV medium is to park your eyeballs on commercials so that you will buy the products. From the pov of the TV folks, the shows are incidental.
Unfortunately, you the viewer have demonstrated an unfortunate reluctance to immerse yourself in 30-120 minute blocks of advertisements.
Until such time as TV producers find a way to convince you to do that, you can expect them to do as much as is technically possible to add commercials until you get frustrated and stop watching TV.
The networks don't care whether you like the content of the programs. They only care whether you will watch the programs enough that a certain percentage of you see and or hear the advertisements.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Cutting out scenes where there was a lot of "dialog"... sounds like most porn. The logical extreme isn't just compilation tapes, it's the "cumshot" compilation tape.
Is this what we have to look forward to in mainstream TV in a few years? The average half hour comedy will be reduced to a few punchlines - "Grace, is that a garbage sack?" "It was the FISH!", and the average hour drama will be a "bang!" "You're under arrest." "But my brother was in Brooklyn!" "Guilty".
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I mean, if it works on the program, why not snip a few frames from the ads too? Maybe you could squeeze in a 15 sec slot in there somewhere? If you really want to get nasty, you can place continous ads in place of the network logos that have become so annoying. Just fade them in and out... (Ooops, shouldn't even joke about that!)
}#q NO CARRIER
It means I'll now be able to watch a 30 minute program recorded on my Tivo in 21 minutes and 30 seconds instead of 22 minutes.
Asssuming I watch on average 30 minutes of TV a day, this means I could have an extra three hours of time per year. Thats enough time to make another 36 karma-whoring, irrelevant and offtopic posts like this one to Slashdot.
It's funny to hear some people's reactions as if this is the first time anyone has disturbed the pristine timing of their television shows.
Consider all theatrical releases and most high-budget television drama that's shot on 24fps film: when shown at 30fps NTSC, it goes through 3:2 pulldown, which out of necessity assigns a varying number of video fields to each frame. Oddly enough, the resulting effect gives the material a "film look" that is usually considered a good thing. In fact, some processes exist that attempt to give a similar look to shows that are shot on video.
And when the same 24fps film is broadcast in a PAL country at 25fps, all the broadcaster usually does is just speed up the film! That's much more drastic than removing selected frames, yet does playing the film 4% faster destroy it's dramatic value? Probably not, although it seems like musicals would suffer.
...then I'll get a +5, Funny. Otherwise, 0 or 1.
Why not take all the 200 millisecond frames that are cut and splice them together for one 30-second "Megacommercial" at the end of the show, like at the end of the great movie Cinema Paradiso!
For people who use capture cards and record shows on their computers, things like this can be really annoying.
I capture shows for personal use, not to pirate, but to have a copy that I can watch at my leisure when I want. For example, some of the recent live-action Tick episodes have been pretty good, but will I ever get to see them again once Fox takes the show off the air? Dubious.
VHS is no good, because the quality gradually degrades. So I make digital captures.
Unfortunately, I'm kind of a purist, and missing frames would bug the hell out of me. Even worse, a lot of shows nowadays are recorded on film and telecined. Performing an inverse-telecine operation to reconstruct the progressive frames is easy if there's a consistent telecine pattern throughout the show; otherwise I have to rely on imperfect adaptive IVTC algorithms or do a lot of manual tweaking. It already gives me a headache; I doubt that a telecine pattern that shifts once a second is going to make the process any easier.
Of course, it's in the content providers' best interests to discourage people like me from capturing shows in the first place. Oh well.
another good intent for the "time machine" was to compress movies to fit in allocated time slots. ie-> trim a > 2 hour movie down to 2 hours.
I look at this as being somewhat similar (though not nearly as bad) as what several radio stations have been doing lately. Several stations in my area currently use a song's intro to continue talking or, increasingly, air additional advertisements or continue airing a lengthy one. To make matters worse, you can still hear the song's intro in the background.
I understand the importance of commercials in both television and radio - it's how they get their revenue, of course. But for awhile now radio stations (and, increasingly, television stations) have begun forgetting that the reason they have advertisers is because they have listeners/viewers. It's not the other way around.
--
Welcome to the land of the easily amused...
Since the technology dumps the duplicate frames, this would make those infinitely long art films in which nothing happens much shorter. Real-Time Warhol films would all of a sudden become time-lapse. Sweet.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
It only supports three speeds, though, so it's not as variable as you're hoping.
This is very common on the Game Show Network, and has been going on for months.
Note all the complaining about their "time machine" in the newsgroup.
It is especially noticeable during Press Your Luck, due to the fast repetitive action of the game board. Michael Larsen would have a hard time using his VCR to beat the game today, as the frames now don't appear as smoothly and consistently as they once did!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Well this has been indeed for quite a while. But it is illegal in the US. Actually it is used elsewhere (Mexico by instance) You would be surprised at the ad rate that is really out there... 4 minutes of content and 3 of ads, legally.... think about it
Life is just 1s and 0s ---------------------- Snatcher, MGS & Policenauts at: http://junkerhq.net
...but tv shows aren't 30 mins. in the first place, so the added commercial would be cutting into the OTHER commercials. That's silly!
Another techniques used by radio broadcasters is to speed up music by 3-4%. This over time gives a lot more room for more commercials or even more songs (since many stations promote X number of songs per hour).
One poster mentioned that this could be used on commercials, thus giving space for more commercials, but this technique would not be allowed. The contracts (at least those that I have seen) stipulate that such measures cannot be taken during their commercials, but that is not usually the case for music.
I worked in the IT department of a local radio network that owned several local stations (I left when Clear Channel bought them out) for a couple of years.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
You're thinking of it too analogly. (is that a word?)
They're not actually speeding up the show, they're dropping a frame every minute or so. All the other frames are fine and stay intact so therefore the pitch does not change.
This isn't the same as speeding up a record player so a 5 minute song gets finished in 4 minutes. THAT would change the pitch. This does not.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
on a cable channel. It made the motion slightly odd, like the characters were slightly androids or something (besides Data, of course). It was unpleasent. The lack of smoothness was not blatant, but once I noticed it, I tended to hone in on the affect for some reason, like a scratch on a new car. Maybe others won't be as sensative to it, but it bothered me.
They also did a cheap version on the LA copy of the Howard Stern show (sound compression) in order to make room for traffic reports. It is annoying there too.
Toss that crap.
Table-ized A.I.
I've noticed a number of older shows in recent years that have seemed "compressed" or sped up in some unnatural way. Often the dialog doesn't even sync with the picture any more. It's very disconcerting to watch...you keep feeling something is subtly wrong, and it gives you a headache in a short time.
Just like the parent poster, I no longer watch shows that have been mangled in this way.
If the machine removes duplicate frames that are actually supposed to be there, when this is done over and over again to gain 30 seconds, wouldn't this result in ultimately "fast-forwarding" the TV show? Maybe its somewhat imperceptible, but removing frames and then playing whats left at the "regular" rate should mean that things should be happening faster in the program. Try and put a 3 hour movie into a 2 hour timeslot with this technology and I'd find it hard to believe that it wouldn't look like things are happening in fast-forward. -Leshrac55
This is quite a vicious cycle they are entering into. By adding more and more comercials to content they are reducing the value of the content and hence the value of the commercials displayed during that content. To compensate they'll need to add more commercials and so on. Why not have less commercials and charge more for them (heck this could even result in higher quality of commercials). I guess this is no supprise for the good old USA where the three major sports (Grid Iron, Basketball and Baseball) are all designed and continually redesigned to make them better for television (that is more time for commercials, less time for content).
While studying Film (or was it Media?) in my final year of high school we covered something similar to this.
The story goes like this. A television station was airing some non-descript movie and decided to speed up the film (yes, thats right, they didn't cut frames or scenes out, they sped up the movie!) to make it fit into it's timeslot (the film was half an hour too long).
When the director of the movie found out he sued the station because they altered his work without his permission. The same thing goes for movies being converted from wide-screen, as it's seen as an alteration of the artist's work and therefore the permission of the director is required.
So going by that precedent, this kind of technology shouldn't be allowed to go ahead without artists permissions!
Oh, gt over it! It's the Amercan ingenuty and know-hw that gos into fne technolgy such as the televsion time-shifter that is the crnerstne of our great contry's powerful ecnomy. ****SIGN UP FOR QWORST LONG DISTANCE AND SAVE UP TO 10%!!!**** Why, if it wern't for telvision advertsing, how do you thnk we'd be able to py for all of those ads in the frst place? **** SIGN UP NOW AND RECEIVE A COMPLIMENTARY SACK OF GORP!!!**** And if it wern't for all those advrtisements, how would anyne be able to wake up in the mrning after a good night's rest, mak their teeth thir whitest, eat part of a balancd nutritous breakfst, drive their ****LOOK AT THIS SUPERMODEL'S TITS! BUY OUR PRODUCT!!!**** new Dodge Durango to work at their job brnging good things to life, and thn going home to giv the cats some Friskies and watch some telvision? ***** BUY SOME NOW!!! **** Either you're for our wy of lif, or you're some knd of anti-american terrorist!!!
Maybe this sounds kind of silly, but the amount of commercials on actually keeps me from watching TV. They make me far more upset than the average person, I believe, mostly because they're so insulting.
Three reasons to watch TV:
1. The Simpsons
2. NBA games
3. The occasional Jackie Chan movie.
Other than that, the TV stays off, and the computer stays on.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
OK, now what we need is a consumer level device like that, so we can squeeze a 30 sec commercial break into 3 sec let's say. I don't think anybody will mind dropping those frames.
The article states that advertising groups have insisted that their adverts don't get cut in any way, and the company making the product have assured them that it won't remove frames from adverts, only programming.
But why didn't he simply tell them that no one would notice these "pesky duplicate frames"?
The answer must be that you CAN notice a difference. 30 seconds less show in half an hour is about 1 second every minute. That time HAS to come from somewhere, and makers of shows are right to think that this technology will alter aspects of the show -- maybe it will be a subtle change, but a lot of drama is about subtle moments.
Too bad it is not an option. ...
Everyone is forced to pay for it
LoL - doesn't have much to do with the parent post, but still damn funny.
Last post!
Why not just download the whole show in
a few seconds and jack into it whenever
you feel like it.
Is there a 110% speed option in the windows media player?
TV gets more annoying each year. More commercials, cut scenes, those little floating logos (I find them very distracting), split squished screens, digitally inserted placements, etc...
Really, cancel your cable. You won't miss it a bit after a couple of weeks.
Anarchists never rule
If anything, the CBC is more critical of the government than other stations. Heck, it runs _This Hour Has 22 Minutes_, _Air Farce_, and other satire/comedy shows that, among other things, openly mock government figures. Can you imagine Marg, Princess Warrior threatening to smite Ashcroft? Or Colonel Stacey firing the chicken cannon at a picture of Bush? "Bill C-36 is a satirical examination of civil liberties. Some viewers may be arrested for their sense of humour." - The 'warning' at the beginning of a recent 22 minutes show, a spoof of their usual "This Hour Has 22 Minutes is a satirical examination of daily events. Some viewers may not share this sense of humour." warning. And frankly, I don't see how corporate-controlled media outlets are all that better than government ones...
What is really amazing about this technology is that it throws out the correct frames, not just any frame. Even the casual observer will occasionaly notice when a frame is dropped (in a fade out, or cross fade for example). So this device (apparently) can throw out only the frames you won't miss as a viewer. What's amazing is that it does it all 'real time.' Of course real time in television does not mean the same thing in the computer world. Other products have this feature (adobe after effects, others) but they lack the horsepower to do it 'on the fly' (the video world slang equivilant to the computer world 'real time'). The networks have already become increasingly careful about how much time they show you a black screen. Often they won't fade to black any longer, but prefer hard cuts to commercials and other scenes. Television equipment is horribly expensive, and the amount that union workers get paid to run the equipment is unreal, not to mention how much talent wants now-a-days to perform. I'm sure that everyone is trying new ways to insert an extra 30 seconds into a broadcast just to pay for it all, and still make a large enough profit to justify their existance.
One thing that gets me in the article is that you have to run the spot in front of the show (time delay)! So what happens when the machine can't remove enough frames.... now you are 30 seconds behind. I can just imagine all the complaints when the station chops off the last bit of a show containing the punchline so they can meet back up with the network at the top of the hour (resync for news/live events).
If this existed Back in the Day, we would never had been able to make fun of William Shatner for all those dramatic pauses after every word.
And where would we be without the William Shatner School of Acting?
I understand commercials are a necessary evil that we have become acoustomed to, but why can't I have the option to pay a little bit extra for no commercials. Here's how I think the ideal situation would work...
Because, as nice as it would be, it would be a huge pain in the ass for the cable companies, TV networks, etc. to coordinate among each other. Remember, the commercials aren't paying your cable company's expenses -- they're paying the stations' and networks' expenses. And in most cases, cable companies and networks are not run by the same company (except for FTC antitrust screwups like AOLTW*). Sure, it *could* be done, but the operating costs would be outrageously high. And guess who would end up paying those costs? That's right. You.
* Going a little bit OT here, but does anybody else think that AOL being able to run free ads on such high-profile stations as CNN is a huuuuuuuuuge anti-trust problem? Remember, they own the network. They can run whatever they want on it and not have to be charged a cent. And anybody who watches CNN at all will know that they run lots and lots of AOL ads.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I have been recording 3 sec bits of network spam for the last year. It makes for a great one hour torture session mpeg to email an advertiser labeled "promo treatment" or something similar. They eat my time so I send them misleading distractions... Eat this beoch...
So many complaints, and for what? Hasn't anyone noticed that TV has generally sucked dick since its invention? Hey, so it's going to suck dick even more - big surprise!
Think about it: the average American thinks that "Seinfield" is the height of programming. The average American spends 3 hours a day in front of the tube doing...absolutely nothing. Not a criticism, mind you, what you do with your leisure time is your business; but if you're one of those Americans snorting the media version of cocaine then hasn't the commercial 'cut' already left a blood trail across your nasal passages?
And you think another 3 minutes of commercials in your three-hour allotment is really going to make a difference? Will you honestly stop watching episode 87 of "Seinfeld" for the 126th time just because you lose 30 seconds of it? Tell me another....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
You know ... there is one sure-fire way to avoid seeing or listening to commercials on your television or radio.
It doesnt involve any hi-tech gadgets, no pre-recording of show and fast-forwarding.
Its worked flawlessly for me for more than 3 years, and it doesnt cost a penny.
Simply dont turn your TV on.
I don't recall seeing any real non-TechTV ads on the channel. But then again I live in Hong Kong...w00t...so probably they strip out the american ads, just as CNBC Asia shows local ads during Squawk Box commercial time. Actually - I kind of like the TechTV ads with all of the 3d stuff.
;)
However, I feel for you people...I wouldn't want to watch Microsoft/other shit company ads for shit products.
Long live Laporte!
One time, a few years ago, a shall remain nameless television cable network was in trouble financially. Ready to go down the tubes. And one of their more common shows that they carried and got good numbers from was The Dukes of Hazzard.
Now what they did was, cut the junk out (watch Dukes again if you don't know what I mean) speed it up a little bit and then speed up the car chases (adding more action... VROOOM!) and took that space to sell more ads. Ultimately it worked and helped out the company, although those that watch TV with a critical eye noticed a little difference that they more laughed about than were really upset over.
It more than paid for itself, and as far as I know, you'd have to really look closely to care.
I see no problem with this technology. It has more of a use for MTV and sports programming when the re-broadcasts run an inordinantly long amount of time or award show celebrities drone on, and you just need to round off a little after you made your timefit edit.
NOW I KNOW THAT MANY OF YOU MIGHT OBJECT, but this really is better than slashing subplots. This keeps the overall show more intact AND helps pay the bills. After all, anyone that says that there is a crisis in the fact that television is going down the tubes, well, this basically doesn't change a thing as far as content. After all, TV is for profit.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
We get about 10 to 15 minutes of commercials for every 15 minutes of program. Especially with movies. A typical 2 hour movie runs 3 hours.
Simply do not buy anything that is advertised too much.
Maybe I'll be flamed for taking this un-american point of view, but these people already stretch movies to gain a 5% of time to put commercials in; soon or later they'll convince you that a movie stretched to 50% fits better the modern life speed and spare time shortage.
Fight them the only way they fear: no sells.
I thought they were the same network broadcast on different frequencies. Last time I checked, they played the exact same video footage on the news at the same time slot, same music videos at the same time, and even murder she wrote was played at the same time (different episodes) on different channels. Australian (and especially also New Zealand) television explains why aussies and kiwis are good at sport - the TV is so crap that you have to go outside and play. Britain on the other hand has excellent TV and so is crap at sport.
They play simpsons episodes in 20 minutes. Back to back in 40 minutes. Where did you get the idea they were a half hour show?
y li st.cgi?service_id=4224&day=Today#evening
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/search/da
THIS is why why I love the BBC... ahhh - that last bastion of advertisment-free television. It makes me glad that I pay my £100-odd TV license fee every year.
I'd like to think that having ad-free TV will also prevent the commercial channels from putting too many ads inbetween their programs as well - simply because they'll get compared to ad-free TV.
This is funny! Someone thinking this is "news".
Television Stations have had this capability for over 15 years now. I remember back in college (1986) when I worked for the local PBS affiliate, we had just started to get in new 1" VTR's (Video Tape Recorders) - Hitachi's. These 1" units were to replace our aging 2" Quad machines. One of the neater features of the Hitachi's were their ability to time-compress or time-expand a show.
For example, if we had a time slot of 58:20 and the show on the tape reel was 59:05, we could program the Hitachi to play 59:05 worth of tape in 58:20 with full frame lock. There was even an option available (we didn't buy it) that allowed us to connect the audio output to an Eventide Harmonizer to "pitch correct" the audio when you did this time correction to a program. This was in 1986.
This is old news, about old technology. Move along - nothing to see here....
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
The basic approach that Prime Image uses to "microedit" television programming to compress time has been around for at least a few years. Prime may have a new, patented way to do it, but it's not really news, just an overactive publicist who shoehorned a Tech TV writer into a visit.
And BTW, you CAN see this effect, and it is very annoying. Look for it on broadcasts of older series re-runs or movies on local stations. Watch the image closely when there's (otherwise) smooth horizontal movement, like when a camera is panning left or right or when people are walking back and forth. I can see tiny clips in the movement from time to time, not as bad as a badly buffered videostream, but noticable. I've never noticed an effect on the audio.
Still, considering it's only used by cheap-ass local stations whose NTSC signal is shite compared to a nice, pure digital cable/satellite channel anyway, and occurs only on movie re-runs that are probably clipped for content and blown up to fill the TV frame anyway, it's probably going overboard to bitch too much. Things like this will have a self-limiting effect, because the more "free" broadcasters deteriorate the quality of their programming in ways like this, the more people will flock to alternatives, even paid ones.
...I've noticed it in effect on several cable networks (Game Show Network is a serious offender here). They say it's supposed to be unnoticeable, but it jumps out at me.
However, as a master control operator, I believe that one of these things would be nice to gain back a few seconds if you're over. Not 30 seconds, but more like 3 or 4.
I found out on my own the basic gist of how it works - it basically chops off part of a frame and then adds what remains to the next frame. It's really noticeable when there is supposed to be a smooth pan and this box jerks it up.
FC Closer
They wouldn't do this because the moment an advertiser found out about it, they'd raise immortal hell.
FC Closer
Television stations have been doing this since i was at WRTV-6 back about 10 years ago. The unit was almost exclusively used for shows in syndication like the Andy Griffith show and Laverne and Shirley. I dont think it was ever used on a weeknight before 11pm. Its unlikely that you will ever seen any stations use this in prime time because the effects are visible to anyone that watches the images and listens to the sound carefully.
The FCC should be acting in the consumer's best interest, rather than the corporations interests. They are an arm of the people, who surely outnumber the corporations. What the FCC should do, is require ALL commercials be played during the first 5 minutes only, leaving the rest of the hour for program content. Does that sound communist or what? It would give us all a time to take a dump before our favorite shows. 30 minute shows would follow the same methodology, only at the top of the hour should commercials be shown. I never buy anything I see on television anyway and I know there are millions like me out there.
This is nothing new -- they've been doing it for years. Compressing the film by a few seconds (by speeding it up slightly), then flanging the audio down a bit so that the actors' voices don't sound strangely higher than usual. I learned about it a few years ago in some Communication classes, and then noticed it when I saw "Christmas Vacation" on TV. After having seen the movie at least 50 times on video (at the intended speed), I noticed that the timing of the dialogue just seemed "off" somehow. By halfway through the movie I was really unnerved -- it was so strange to hear something that should be familiar, and somehow was familiar, played just a little too fast to be familiar.
That said, I'm glad that this kind of thing is getting more coverage -- it takes an already ad-saturated medium and makes it worse! (One of the reasons I tend to shun the box, but then I bet everyone on /. says that.)
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Dear viewer,
We interrupt this commercial for a useful TV program.
We hereby apologize for the inconvenience this may cause to our audience.
We'll do our best to avoid further interrupts of this nature.
Remember our station's slogan : BUY !! BUY !! BUY !!
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
What kind of backward thinking is this? TV is loosing viewers to cable and internet, so lets try to squeeze in more ads to make up the difference. Why is it the solution always lets show more ads. If you have valuable content people want, they'll sit around for the ads. If the content is pure garbage, this invention is useless. It might be cool and all, but who really cares. I'd much rather watch commercials than watch a few extra frames of a lame show, if I had to choose.
The only reason I ever watch a commercial is because I want to watch a movie. If this device degrades my program I will watch some other show, and watch THAT station's commercials.
'40 channels of shit on the TV'
Taking a cue from all those advertisements that have been chopping the bottoms off the screen and overwriting part of the action with a semi-transparent channel logo I hereby predict:
Remember, you read it on Slashdot first!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Blink in the commercials one frame at a time throughout the course of the show, so I don't actually have to watch them or anything.
Just make sure you test this real good so that my head doesn't explode like in Max Headroom
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
yet another reason to turn off the TV, as if you didn't have enough.
Well they are not exactly free. If CNN is running an AOL ad they are not running a paying ad, nor are they running content that keeps people thinking it is worth watching CNN. So even if they don't internally charge money, they are at least foregoing other revenue (and I assume they are internally charging money, maybe at a discount -- and at some point the discount will get killed when the business unit selling the discounted product has to tighten it's budget...)(
Anyon remember the old TV series Max Headroom and the Blip Ads? When are we going to have the first person explode because TV is accelerated too much?
http://whittenburgs.com
Atlanta is Peace, love and traffic jams!
Fucking football hating dork.
actually .. the commercials you view on cable generally *ARE* generating $$ for your cable company. Comcast has HUGE headends to just replace commercials in broadcasts.
.. they will sell time to local companies .. and if they have no commercial slots paid for at that time. Coke, Pepsi, or another national marketer will buy the time (sight unseen) .. although it pays less for them that way.
As a general rule
So don't expect commercial-less tv from your cable provider any time soon.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I keep telling you guys, digital sucks! SPACE here in Toronto broadcasts their signal digitally. I love SPACE, except when the broadcast freezes an image, to lower the bits sent on the limited bandwidth, it lags once something moves on the screen. This is actually a feature to save bandwidth. Lucky me! *snark* How about presenting my TV show without washed out colour, banding, and lag?
If you call the cable company, they laugh at you, if you call the TV station, they don't even answer.
Major league baseball or The NFL (I can't remember which now) was recently looking into allegations that an affiliate was using this compression technology during a game. A sports writer with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was listening to the game on radio and simultaneously having the game on tv(muted). He noticed that the game on TV wasn't live anymore when images on TV weren't matching up with the live radio broadcast. MLB (sub-NFL) were looking into allegations that the affiliate was now rebroadcasting the game, without the expressed consent of the league. (more likely the league was upset that the affiliate was generating some of that sweet,sweet ad revenue and not passing it on to them!)
Television has been telling people what to do and how to think for too long. I think that the world itself needs to make the choice as to weither we should really be doing everything that is seen or done on TV. People really need to know how to make there own choices and not have to listen to what TV has to say or to see what is new. I can see the use of comercials to tell us something that is new but they don't have to make us feel like we must have this product what ever it may me. I have been living without TV now for 3 years and I am happy that i have not been warching. There are some good shows that i have not seen but it is not woth having to pay for. I am paying for TV just so i can watch comercials and get told what i should do. I can have just as buch fun here behind my computer and not have to worry about comercials. I know there are ads on the internt also but there are nice little programs hat stom them from being shown. also there are like no sites that i go to that have that many ads anyways. Well thx for listening to me bitch. Zeberoli
Zeberoli
...all the duplicate frames does this mean that South Park episodes will take one minute to air?
Digital Time Machine? Oh, I feel for whoever needs to explain to the technologically illiterate that this is NOT a machine that can travel you through time...
"Yeah, tech support? I thought my TV had a digital time machine now. Why can't I go back to my senior prom?"
They overcompress to minimize the required bandwidth to allow them to add more worthless channels. I've been recording the over-the-air signal lately to get better quality. I can tolerate the little bit of ghosting better than the digital picture that looks like a pre-school jigsaw puzzle.
BTW, it's ALL NTSB. If it wasn't, you wouldn't be able to see it on your NTSB TV.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Watching the NFL playoffs yesterday really brought home that pro football games have become more commercials than sport. It's gotten to the point where they cut out plays for commercials, come back from commercial break for a minute, and then go right back to commercial as soon as possible (sometimes under 30 seconds later). But this trend certainly isn?t limited to professional sports. As long as shows keep becoming more costly to produce (whether it be by actor's salaries, broadcasting rights, etc) the TV producers will keep trying to offset that cost by adding more and longer commercials. Yeah, this technology sounds interesting (scary, but intersecting), but don?t forget that most content has already been "edited for TV" anyway.
It's futile to time-compress the content to get me to watch more commercials, because I already time-compress the commercials (and other filler) with my Tivo's fast-forward button.
Heck, it already only takes about 10-12 minutes to watch an hour-long "Battlebots". It's pretty exciting to think it could go even faster. "Holy moly, those are fast vehicles!"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Man! I wish we could edit and delete our own posts.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I thought television wasn't really measured in frames per second. Isn't American TV 60 fields per second? How does it drop frames in interlaced video? You're really seeing half of two frames at all times because the gun scans the even then the odd lines... right? The fun thing to point out is that cable tv was originally commercial free because you were paying for it. I guess we sucked it up just like we're doing with our $9 movies. Does paying $$$ for a movie preceded with commercials piss anyone else off?
There is no graceful way to eat an egg salad sandwich.
And they are paying ("internally", as you put it) - it counts as a positive for CNN revenue and a negative for AOL, even though it all ultimately amounts to free advertising for AOL on AOL's CNN station.
It's no different then ABC advertising ABC shows, or ABC advertising Disney, for that matter - how come nobody bitches about that?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I know that's not what they're doing (though the other poster has a good point that they must be doing something with the sound!).
My point was rather than this somewhat lame idea of dropping a frame here and there which seems to be done to beenfit broadcasters (more commercials!), why not offer the end user something to really make watching TV better by making it take less time for me. Most shows are SO slowly paced I can hardly stand to watch them. I guess that's why pretty much the only thing I watch anymore is TechTV (for some reason I am somewhat addicted), and sometimes CSI.
I'd love to be able to watch two hours of news in fifteen minutes.
I even have an improvement on this feature - let you watch it up to 16x faster with pitch-shifted video. A bit fast to follow, but when you come across somethintg that might be interested you hit a "bookmark" button that indicates you are interested in that - when the whole show is done you can skip through previously set bookmarks at near normal speed and skip to the next bookmark when they are done with the interesting bit.
Similar to simple FF of course, but I can imagine it being more efficient.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Turn on the closed captioning on your TV, then fast forward the tivo at the level 1 speed. That's slow enough that the captions are still displayed, and you can read them. Not exactly what you want, but it works really well to go quickly through news and sports broadcasts and talk shows.
Earlier this season, KDKA, the Pittsburgh CBS affiliate, was caught using this technology to compress out enough time from a Steelers game to insert an additional 30 second commercial. The NFL wasn't amused.
see http://www.radiocrow.com/news_docs/caught.htm for details.
Remember the good old days, when radio lagged behind TV? Even yesterday, I was going nuts, because I'd hear Myron Cope make the call ~2 seconds before I saw it on TV!
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
What this boils down to is simple. Television programming is created to sell ads. That's right, the TV execs only care about the advertising that they can sell. TV isn't there for you, the consumer, it's there for the advertisers.
Sad, but true. Boycott your TV and write the LOCAL networks letters expressing your opinions. They need to get slapped back into realizing that their viewers come first!
Hearing talk of speeding up audio and video reminds me of my dad's story of when he was a projectionist in a small movie theatre in New Zealand in the 1950s when electricity was in short supply (why the shortage I'm not sure). The movies were timed to end before 10 pm when there was always a planned power cut. Things didn't always go to plan. If it became clear that they weren't going to make it in time then the only options were to increase the projector speed or miss the end of the movie. Some movies ended at double normal speed :-)
I've suggested this too, and been told that it's a hardware problem. The MPEG chips Tivo uses can't deliver sound in any other speed than normal.
Just think.. if this system was running on my computer, I'd spend at least an hour less each day playing Unreal Tournament and Return To Castle Wolfenstein!
This is a great tool for increasing productivity. In fact, if you ran it on every computer in the world, you could increase productivity by at least 10%!
mogorific carpentry experiments
More Destruction, less talk!!!
-
Ra7
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Its amazing how much crap people will take. Its one thing to fill free-to-air tv with adverts, but when your paying a subscription (i.e for cable/digital/sat.) you better make damn sure your not putting adverts in it too. If the bbc started advertising, there would be riots on the streets, but if cable companies start taking fu*king frames out of tv that you have paid for just so those capitalist pig dogs can stick more adverts in, then no-one takes any notice. How does that work?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Time Trimming the commercial for a change?
The music industry convinced me to stop using their product. The prices have become exhorbitant, and the quality of the artistry has become lousy. Songwriters don't put out albums anymore, marketing departments do. So I have tossed them aside and stick with the old tunes that I still love. For new stuff I follow local bands and non-music-industry-affiliated bands I find here and there on the internet. I find that these guys, while they don't always have access to the best sound equipment, are producing songs of greater interest than the latest smash pop barbie/ken doll. ... I'm still hoping the MPAA and FCC don't manage to do to movies what the music industry has done to music.
The movie industry has almost convinced me to stop using their product. Movie prices keep rising, the quality of the theatres keep dropping. I find it unacceptable to go to a theatre and see 5 minutes of "black rain" when there's a bright white scene. I think that movies are also moving into the abyss, much like music, but at a much slower pace. There are still enough people making interesting movies to keep my interest alive. So if I shirk theatres that's no big deal; it's simple to make a home theatre these days. And then there's the whole DVD and HDTV mess
While I gave up on network TV a long time ago, I've found that many cable/satellite channels have quality entertainment in their lineups. Because of the sheer number of available channels, I always figured that cable/satellite TV would stay relatively unscathed by all the BS that has destroyed the music industry, and is gnawing at the movie industry. Then I read articles like this, and ones that talk about the fervent attepts to destroy the ability to record television programs. I can easily see television being the next media outlet that I throw away.
If there are any music/movie/television industry workers reading this thread, I just want to make it clear that in your rabid pursuit to further unbalance the scales of product and profit you are at the very least going to lose this customer. And I can't help but think there are others who feel the same.
I guess I'm done ranting for now.
RFC2119
...to stop the kind of crap. This is what federal regulations are for.
What's next, a reference to the Amazon Learning Perl book?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Even worse than time compressing the show to squeeze an extra 30 seconds out -- TNN picture squeezing every Star Trek: TNG episode to put in some goddamned ad-bar at the bottom of the screen!
The bar takes up the bottom 5-10% of the screen, and as a result, the rest of the picture is vertically compressed to fit in the remaining space. Right now the bottom bar shows nothing but the show title, but rumor has it they're going to make it a banner ad in the future. Sheesh.
This previous-show-runover stuff messes up my Tivo too, since the "official" timeslot for the Simpsons remains at 7:00 (or whatever) even if they play the whole show starting at 7:15. Grr.
Is it okay to cry "Movie!" in a crowded firehouse? --Steve Martin
Who's up for making the next slashdot on the internet2 with video comments instead? Count me in :-)
ok, I shouldn't be replying to your sig, but I have to. Hell no! can you imagine the trolls? and what about the goatse links?
Fish
Well, here in Kingsport TN, my analog channels look a lot worse than the best digital channels (like the premiums, and some of the regular digital channels). Granted, there are some very shitty digital channels, but my digital channels tend to look better. And I can put up with a slight bit of artifacting, I have to look really close to see it anyway.
FC Closer
Prime Image in San Jose, California, the same company that produces controversial Digital Time Machine will start producing a device that can be attached to your TV or VCR that will detect when a commercial starts and ends by comparing the signal that is coming from the station and figuring out whether the data was compressed using DTM. If the signal that is sent has never being compressed - it must be a commercial. This will empower the customers to record their favorit shows without any commercials in them and it will work better than the analogous technologies provided by some VCR companies.
In related news Prime Image in San Jose, California, the same company that produces controversial Digital Time Machine and produces a digital device for consumers to circumvent the DTM has now created new technology that will allow the TV and VCR manufacturers to circumvent the DTM circumvention device and in fact to forbig the consumers to switch channels during commercials (unless the channel that the consumer is switching to is running another commercial.) This will empower the advertisement companies to bring better quality programming to your local cable providers and TV stations by charging the ad creators more money for the commercials during which you can not switch the channel. The ad producers will have to pay more to have their commercials to run in this special anti-remote control protective mode. In for an extra fee, the anti-protective mode will have the AD-GOD bit turn on, which will forbid the user to turn of their TVs and in fact will turn TV on for that specific commercial.
In related news Prime Image in San Jose, California, the same company that produces controversial Digital Time Machine, produces a digital device for consumers to circumvent the DTM and produces a device to circumvent the circumvention for DTM has now created new technology that allows consumers to circumvent the circumvention of a DTM circumvention device. This brilliant novell idea was described to us as the latest in the world of circumvention devices. This is a service that the consumers can subscribe to in order to have their TVs power down during AD-GOD type commercials and that will in fact allow consumers to do something usefull with their lives rather than watching television. The TV manufacturers together with the content providers and the cable providers are outraged.
You can't handle the truth.
If they do this to Wizard of Oz, there
will be problems sync'ing to Pink Floyd.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Then this'll get a +5, Funny. Otherwise, it'll get 0 or 1...
:-)
Why not take all the hundreds of millisecond cuts from the shows and commercials, and at the end of the program, splice them all together for one grand 30-second "Megacommercial," like they did at the end of Cinema Paradiso!
Can't get first post if you read the article first!
"...which over the course of a 30 minute program, can add up to 30 seconds..."
let's not forget that in a half hour of television, the show is already interjecting with a number of two-and-a-half-minute commercial segments and so isn't really a full half-hour long.
this isn't a bad idea. the process to automate this would probably cut a frame from the signal at regular intervals as its being broadcast, and then spit out the commercial time at the very end.
television broadcasts at either 25 or 29.97 frames per second -- to get a second every minute, you need to cut that many frames a minute; one frame about every other second.
but what happens if the stream is cut at various points? suppose the network plays a pre-cut,
minus-30-sec version of the tape. and suppose they also broadcast with a second-a-minute cut. that's one minute. suppose the satellite provider also cuts a second a minute, and suppose the local affiliate sells a full cut-minute to the local sponsors. by that time it's already two a half minutes shorter -- hmm, that's another commercial segment.
however, if i was an ad exec, what i would do instead is rally all the sponsors to lobby to censor more material after the networks have already filmed their episodes. it would probably be very easy to cut the average show or movie by two and a half minutes. however, the time-machien way disperses more money among all of those involved. however, my way of doing it would simply just involve more people -- including myself and all the lawyers, lobbyists, and paperworkers involved. however, it would also give all the anti-censorship proponents something to be pissed off about. however, this time-machine-cutting process will make everybody appear jerkier anyways, and so it wouldn't make any damn difference.
i dunno. maybe it's a good idea.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Even though it's called a "Time Machine", it won't work on live telivision.
You know the instant replay feature on Tivo? This is just the reverse of that.
More interestingly... TV has a kinda standard 22 minutes of program per 1/2 hour show. This number evolved not because broadcasters didn't want to run more advertisements, but because it's the point at which balance is achieved between the numbers of spots run and the number of viewers you have to see them.
The revenue plot can be likened to a negative quadratic equation. Too many commercials and people stop tuning in, hence lost ratings and lost $$. The other side of the scale is not enough commercials, therefore not enough advertising dollars.
The vertex, if you will, is around 8 minutes of programming in a 30 minute program, and it's a number which has remained pretty constant since the mass-acceptance of television in the 1950s.
This technique will therefore really only be of value in attempting to adjust a TV show to appeal to the same sorts of people who watch infomercials. (Who the hell watches those, anyway?)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
just the fact that there are pig dogs at all pisses me off. i'm with you!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
i think i have seen this in use. i have noticed many small "jumps" or "pops" in the feed over the past few days on fox. i thought to myself at one point, "that looks like a frame was missing from the stream."
i had assumed it had something to do with this digital cable crap that i had installed recently.
Commercials _are_ the new plastic art. Having your art displayed as "Commercial" is a seal of approval that you are good enough to make the cut. Commercialism doesn't make the medium; it just validates the content.
So that about sums it up. The art world isn't in the galleries any more, it's inside the commercials.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
A saturated market of competition, stock holders wanting to see revenue increase every year, and customers willing to spend but so much... don't these companies realize you can only get but so much milk from the cow? Granted this story is an example of a much larger problem in our economy, but these excessive options we have between 300 tv channels between broadcast tv/cable/satellite, all the radio stations, along with the new satellite radio stations (1 currently available, 1 on the way), it's a bit much.
If there wasn't a saturated market of competition, we would get better quality programming, instead of filler quantity garbage. There would also be no need for trimming of programming allowing for more commercials. But until businesses and the world at large realizes this, I guess we are forced to deal with these business methods to maximize their profits, and to drain our pockets.
"Impossible" is a pretty strong word. I'd bet that a few months of assembly code optimization could produce software fast enough. However, that is an awful lot of development time to spend on a single feature, which is why waiting for hardware support may be a better option.
The other option is that this doesn't need to be done in real time. What if you could instruct your TiVo to work on time-compressing certain shows whenever its CPU is idle? It then becomes irrelevant if the software can't time-compress the MPEG stream in real time. It will throw out whatever frames it can before you start watching so that you can potentially get the full advantages of the time-compression we're talking about, but if you start watching before it's done with the compression it can just let you watch the uncompressed version.
I'm curious now - what does the TiVo use its CPU for when it would otherwise be idle? It seems like it could be put to good use on some sort of space/time optimization feature like this.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Yeah, right. The Democrat Party used to have a very different platform decades ago, but over time that platform changed as the members changed. Maybe you're still stuck in a time warp and believe in certain values that used to describe "conservatives" at some point in history, but that time is past. A group is judged by current members of that group, and their actions. Currently, "conservatives" have increasing business profits as their primary goal. So if you don't believe this way, you should probably find yourself another group to claim yourself as a member of.
like the Tango advert a few years ago. Just a white screen with orange letters saying "Drink Tango. It's Nice." for about five seconds. There was a picture of a guy holding up the can , too.
It was the best advert I've seen in a long time.
(this probably has NOTHING to do with what this story is about, by the way)
TechTV's report makes it sound interesting, but there's a few flaws with it. In order to "gather" enough frames for a 30 second commercial, you need 900 frames. 900 is a lot of frames. Most television shows don't even have 900 cuts in them. Especially sitcom shows might average 300-400, but longer scenes can run than number a lot lower.
Secondly, there isn't 30 minutes of television to subtract from. You've already got an average (and a growing average) of 8 minutes of advertising/network promos/whatever in the 30 minute slot, leaving you with about 22 minutes of prime time. This floats based on shows or networks, but it's almost 1/3 the program. And I'd be rather certain NO advertiser is going to allow 1 frame to be trimmed from their commercial. They want 900 frames. They paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to create those 900 frames.
As for the premise of duplicate frames...well, in NTSC American television, there isn't a duplicate frame. Each frame actually consists of two fields which each fill half the screen with video. 1/60 second each equals the 30 frames a second. Every couple frames, assuming a show has been shot on film, you end up getting one field from the previous frame and one from the next. It's called interlacing. There is no true duplication of the frame, just a residual mixed with the next field.
TV viewers are very used to this look, and that's why news footage looks different than many network shows. Footage without interlacing that's comprised of solid frames (some commercials are using this look) looks rather awkward and forced.
Finally, viewers probably aren't going to notice losing frames. But they are going to notice an additional 30 seconds of commercial time. If you start stretching these breaks towards and beyond the 5 minute mark, this will have an effect. You may be able to hide the subtraction of time, but you can't hide the addition of a commercial.
Gimme my Tivo and the fast-forward button. At least I can control how many frames I'm missing that way.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
My (now discontinued) JVC VHS VCR (HR-VP830) does exactly that. It tries to maintain the pitch even when you speed up play back by sampling audio in a buffer. I used to watch some material at slight higher speeds (say 20% - 40%) and wouldn't notice it at all. Even at 7X speed, it doesn't sound like a chipmonk.
The funny thing is that the video quality is better at slightly higher speed playback. It has 6 heads and can dynamically adjust the tracking.
When playing a tape backwards, it would sample the audio into a buffer and reverse the buffer. What you get is segments of normal audio. It is weird.
It's no different then ABC advertising ABC shows, or ABC advertising Disney, for that matter - how come nobody bitches about that?
ABC and Disney are more or less in the same business, i.e. entertainment on demand. They don't own unrelated companies, much less huge ones, that get 'free' advertising as a perk. Even then, I still see significant antitrust issues with big companies (which once were separate) being able to advertise at next to nothing like this. ABC/Disney is borderline at best, CNN/AOLTW is way over the line.
Not that the FTC pays attention to antitrust issues or public interests any more...
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Why can't they trim the commercials?
Good old BBC. Not perfect by any means, but anybody who like me has lived in UK will tell you that this country is so much poorer for not having a decent public TV service. You have 90% of people spending a large proportion of the day watching TV which is the source for most if not all of their information and entertainment. I believe in free market as much as anybody, but I think there is at least as much of a case for the regulation of content (ex. setting max. time limit for comercials) as there is for most of the other huge multitude of things that are goverment regulated in order to protect consumer from corporate greed.
This has been around for ages for older films and cartoons. I am sensitive to this and get a headache when watching it WRTV 6 locally does EVERYTHING it can with this except live broad casts and the network feeds (I think ABC frowns on it).
Toodles.
I mean, as I've already mentioned, it's "internal" money, but how else is AOL supposed to advertise? Are they supposed to stop advertising on CNN simply because they now own the company? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In a similar vein, is MS supposed to not advertise MSN on the desktop? Or should they just not be allowed to force OEMs from excluding other services? And what difference, ultimately, does it make how much AOL is paying itself to advertise? I mean, they could come out and say "we are playing fair - more than fair, in fact, we charge ourselves twice the going rate!" What difference could it make?
In any event, the crusade against AOL/TW, at this point, sounds like big business hate rant. They haven't really done anything (yet) with respect to this issue to warrant any negative comments. Now, their participation in RIAA and MPAA et. al. makes me dislike them, but I don't have a problem with this advertising businesss - unless you can show how they've excluded others.
Ultimately, the reason I disagree with you, is because there's no alternative that would make you happy except to see no AOL advertisements on any AOL owned channel, and that's hardly fair. You come off as someone who simply doesn't like AOL. That's fine, but that's not an argument.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I guess the expense of the system comes from having to do the frame comparison in real-time.
But pre-encoded video such as MPEG2 already contains key frames and motion compensation data.
So if TiVO for example were to periodically repeat frames which contain minimal changes, you could stretch TV shows by a few minutes during 'live' playback.
And that way by the time you saw the start of the ad TiVO would have buffered enough of the live data to let you skip forward for those minutes.
So you get to watch complete programs uninterrupted.
Actaully, the tentative title of the new NBC show Watching Ellie was originally going to be something along the lines of "22 minutes". I can't find my source fo r that info right now. Anyhow, they were told that they couldn't name it that since 1/2 hours shows in the USA now take less than 22 minutes and they didn't want viewers to have this pointed out to them either by naming the show "21 minutes" or by going ahead with the "22 minutes" title and then dealing with an uproar when people noticed that it was in fact not a 22 minute long show.
Lasers Controlled Games!
...it's a sign of the End Times. Repent!
These devices are used in order to compress a program into the right amount of time so you CAN put the required amount of commericals in.
I hope channels 7 and 10 in Australia employee this - it'll make a nice change from cutting the punchlines that occur just before an add break.
There, is that what you wanted to hear?