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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."
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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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
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>
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
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.
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
We already have them. Advertisers optimize their ads so that if you fast-forward through them, you still get the basic message.
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+++========--------
The device itself and another story for the article.
Shh.
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.
- adam
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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. :)
Many TV shows in syndication (such as The Simpsons and Seinfeld) are routinely time-compressed to squeeze in an extra commercial spot. But the butchering of TV shows does not stop here unfortunately... Usually syndicators will also edit out a brief scene or two from each episode, in order to gain even more commercial time.
Needless to say, "artistic integrity" has never been part of a syndicator's vocabulary...
Cheers.
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.
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."
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 /.
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*/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The BBC may have only a few channels, but they're actually interesting quality television. I've seen American T.V. and out of the 40 or 50 channels there's less material that's actually interesting to watch.
On top of that, there's a lot of stuff available through cable and sattelite if you really want more channels. Most of the watchable American prime-time shows are available (including some un-watchable shows like Survivor).
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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
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.
-----
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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.
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
Same way we used to do it in the cinema when you had a missing frame. If you stick a triangular piece of masking tape over the splice the audience never realises that it was there. The triangle causes the sound levels to be faded to zero and back again in an instant (well probably 1/100th sec).
The human ear can't detect that sort of thing because at the end of the day its actually doing a mechanical version of a fourier transform on the audio signal and drop-outs of that sort don't carry too well.
If you start doing the trick too often there is a significant chance that you miss soething important. Imagine listening to the 1812 overture with random pieces missing, so you don't hear the canon shot etc.
It is possible that they use some other sort of interpolation to smooth over the lost time but then you start to lose the sync between the actors lips and the sound track and it will start to look like Jackie Chan.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
...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.
Not described is another technique to make commercials more affective on watchers: make the shows fucking shit so commercials are a god send.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yes, that is Howie Long, an ex-football player who played defensive end for the Raiders. No, he doesn't play the Tick. That is played by Robert Walburn(?), otherwise known as Puddy(?) from Seinfeld. Howie also was in the forgetable films _Broken Arrow_ and _Firestorm_.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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).
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...
Who the hell mod'd this Funny? I haven't seen a more deserving Troll since I turned off viewing of Anon Cow posts.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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
...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
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."
'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!
You ever see a 'Reader's Digest Condensed Novel?'
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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...)(
...all the duplicate frames does this mean that South Park episodes will take one minute to air?
But they're time compressed in a different way... they actually simply cut content.
I can't count how many times I've watched the Simpsons, was expecting a really good joke (but one that could be cut and not take away from the show), and to have be totally eliminated.
I can't say that I've noticed any other sort of time compression, but I don't doubt it... They must be doing a really good job, though.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
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
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
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?
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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
What's next, a reference to the Amazon Learning Perl book?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
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.
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.
"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.
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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.
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...
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of the Corporate States of America...
You clearly don't watch cricket. We've had plenty of scandals with mikes being on when people didn't realise it.
These have ranged from swearing, insulting players, to worse. In one case, they had a camera looking at the church next to the ground where a couple happened to be having a wedding, and one of the commentators, not realising his mike was on, said it looked like it was a fraudulent "mail-order" marriage.
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.
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There, is that what you wanted to hear?