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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.
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.
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.
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
Did you read the article?
The article clearly says that it does not pop or chirp, and that over 170 stations are already using it. I mean, if it was poping and chirping first of all everyone would know, and second of all the stations wouldn't use it.
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
The time modifed means they may have cut out entire scenes.
Many years ago you would offten find M*A*S*H running at one of the time slots between the 5:00 and 6:30 news. The reason is that it had so many sub plots they could cut out huge amounts of it. It started out as a 30 minute show and I've seen it run in 1/2 that. I was told that a TV station would get the show from the distributers, it would be sorted by run lenght and so if they ran the news over by 7.5 minutes, they could go pull out a shortend show and then they would be back in time for the all importaint 7:00 primetime network slots. This became very clear when they showed the same epposide two days in a row and they were different cuts.
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 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.
From one of the thinkgeek demotivator posters:
Pessimism: Every Dark Cloud Has a Silver Lining, but Lightning Kills Hundreds of People Each Year Who Are Trying to Find It.
Not true.
When you see that "This film has been formatted to fit this screen and edited both for content and to run in the time allotted," the editing to run in the time alotted is not done through some mystical automatic process; it is done by humans deciding which pieces of a film will be cut. Although frames can be trimmed, the removal of words, sentences, and even whole scenes is much more common.
The only "inter-frame interpolation" that occurs in the broadcast of a movie takes place in the conversion of a movie from 24fps to 29.75fps (or 25fps) for playback in NTSC or PAL. This process (called 3:2 or 24:1 pulldown) does not affect the running time of the content.
For what it's worth, I'm a broadcast editor.
-Tom
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.
What pisses me off is that Fox went to all the trouble to pay for Futurama and The Simpsons, and then they keep running the "NFL Postgame" over the Groening time slots. Sometimes they "join the program already in progress," i.e., roll the last scene and credits for the show that "Howie" has blathered over for 25 minutes. Retarded. Shut up, Howie. We all saw the game already.
The one hour of TV I want to see during the week, and they fill it with redundant lip-flapping that contains no new information. Fucking football.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
- adam
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
I would imagine the difference would be virtually unnoticeable if they cut out the first and/or last frames of each scene. Thing is, the number of scene changes varies significantly depending on the show, and the process could be difficult to automate (fast action could be mistaken for a scene change, and that's the last place you want to pull frames). Also, now that I think about it, this method probably won't get 30 seconds of extra time per 30 minute show.
To get 30 seconds out of a 30 minute show (which is really only 22 minutes long plus commercials), you have to remove one out of every 44 frames. By timing them right, it shouldn't be noticeable in most shows. The audio is analog, so it should squash without a noticeable loss in quality. As much as I hate the principle of this thing, I don't think we can complain on grounds of it decreasing the audio/video quality of our shows.
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.
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.
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. :)
The audio or video quality, no. The dramatic quality (such as it is) is another thing entirely. I don't know if losing one frame out of 44 can really alter our perception of a dramatic pause -- are there any editor/director types who claim that sort of precision? But that's not the issue.
It's another 30 seconds out of 30 minutes that you're not watching the program. It stretches out the commercial breaks by padding them even more. This in turn adds to the break in dramatic continuity and of course makes it even more tempting to just walk away and do something else during the commercial break -- perhaps indeed during the rest of the show.
I mean, I already notice how excruciatingly long commercial breaks are now. It's getting to where you can forget what you're watching, for the love of Pete. This is just another way for broadcast TV to commit suicide in slow motion.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
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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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Yeah, like you won't notice if coca-cola starts putting 1/60 more water in their coke. Ask yourself why they don't do it.
:) You've proved my point quite well.
I am positive I wouldn't notice if they started putting more water in thier Coke. I'm not going to ask myself why they don't do it, though, because if I don't notice, how do I know they aren't?
This quote is priceless.
"Officials at CBS' station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, said they accidentally created the delay when they used the machine during halftime to squeeze in extra advertising worth thousands of dollars." (my emphasis)
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Yeah, when I'm 85 and dying in some smelly nursing home someplace, I really want to remember the good times I had watching 18.5 minutes of Sienfeld and 11.5 minutes of commercials every day after work.
Pardon my cynicism tonight, but anybody who watches tv deserves just what they get.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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
There's a solution. Don't watch the channel.
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."
"Television is called a 'medium' because when it's well done, it's rare." -- Ernie Kovacs (famous television personality)
Also attributed to Fred Allen (famous anti-television personality)
Someone you trust is one of us.
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
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.