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The State of Automated Commercial Skipping
iskqy writes "Even though attention to commerical skipping has gone down since the motion picture studios sued replaytv for it, I've noticed that it appears to be alive and well in some PVR products on the market. ReplayTV PVRs have it (though different from what they got sued for) in what they call Show|Nav (what a terrible feature name!) and SnapStream's Beyond TV has it in a feature they call SmartSkip. In both cases, the user has to press a button to automagically skip a commercial (vs. the original ReplayTV feature which skipped them without any user intervention) but it's basically the same thing. ReplayTV plays down commercial skipping ("jump forward and back between scenes in a show") but SnapStream is more open about the feature ("Skip commercials and other parts of TV shows"). "
This has probably been said already (maybe not) but isnt suing replaytv for giving consumers the ability to skip commercials like suing mozilla for blocking popups?
aside from the lawsuits, maybe the push for this techology will force the media to step up their game when it comes to the quality of commercials.. it seems that more and more people are watching things like the superbowl - just to see the commercials that promoters spent time and money to develop.. either the quality of the commercials will increase, or they will go the way of the internet banner ad..
As a TIVO/ReplayTV virgin, how does the commercial skipping operate? Does it skip a certain amount of time ahead? Does it somehow use motion compensation to detect frame changes and stop fast forwarding when the scene has changed a significant amount? Are commercials just a set amount of time and I've never noticed it all these years? Is it more like a VCR system where you have to fast forward and then curse when you went too far, and then it uses scene changes to go back? Any ideas?
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I don't find the auto-skip feature to be very useful in MythTV. It gets it right about 80% of the time, but some shows that I watch with lots of black frames (like 24) tend to get confused with commercial boundaries. 80% isn't good enough yet, but it's an awfully cool feature that I'm sure will improve as the product evolves.
What's so pricey nowadays that requires so many advertisements constantly?
Shareholders ?
It should be easy to identify commercials for skipping. They are the blocks of broadcast time that don't have the Broadcast Flag set.
They have the right to show commercials. They do NOT have the right to expect us to watch them, or to stop us from using technical means to get around them. But I don't think the OP ever mentioned them not having a right to air commercials.
If this ends up being a feature TV watchers like, TV stations will just have to change buisness models. Probably by increasing product placement in lieu of commercials.
Truthfully, I'm surprised that advertisement as a TV revenue stream didn't fail decades ago. Survey results show that it just isn't that effective beyond initial product introductions. And they annoy people. No buisness model thats based on annoying your customers will work once there's an easy way to circumvent the annoyance.
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It appears that the reason ReplayTV got sued is because the boxes were automatically skipping commercials, without the user's intervention in any way. It could be argued that perhaps a user wants to see the commercials, but were prevented from doing so because the PVRs were doing so without prompting from the user.
Popups, on the other hand, and at least for now, require that a person enable popup blocking, so they are voluntarily requesting to skip "web commercials", and it can't be argued that a user might have missed a "feature" that they wanted to see. When Microsoft's next version of IE automagically disables popups, we'll have to see if they get their hands slapped in a simmilar manner to ReplayTV.
Also, it could be argued that popup and popunder advertisements are really a hack/loophole in the web standards (especially popups that trap on the back & close buttons), and that this was not the intended usage, so a user has the right to take "corrective" measures to disable them.
Believe it or not, there's a point to the practice of showing you the same ad time after time. The idea is to burn the idea of the product and logo deep into your brain. They want you to associate the ad, and the situation in the ad, no matter how poorly acted/presented, with a product.
Repeatedly showing the same scenario to you - say, the white nuclear family is talking about Timmy's grades over dinner, Whippy Mayonnaise in the new plastic container falls off the table and falls, bounces, but does not break - is done intentionally, and designed so that over time, when you're sitting at dinner talking about grades, you'll think fleetingly of the new container for Whippy Mayonnaise. Since you've seen it hundreds of times, it occupies that same kind of memory space that your favorite songs do, and will be recalled by associated moments and events. Thus you will be more likely to buy Whippy (because you think about Whippy every night at dinner when you ask your kid about school today). These are called "impressions," and they are carefully crafted by psychologists and marketing people to take over your thoughts about particular events.
In essence, they're trying to take over a part of your brain forever, and all you get for "free" in return is.... television, which frankly sucks.
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There was a controversy about 20 years ago, when ppl started noticing commercials were LOUDER than the show. Measurements were taken, and indeed with a dB meter the show and commercial volumes were about the same.
Some of us knew though, that a dB meter measures 'heating', or average level. The new trick advertisers were using was sampling, which essentially PULSED the audio, at much higher levels, so it looked the same on a meter, because its heating value (duty cycle) was equivalent, but sounded louder, because it deflected speakers more.
Replay commercial skip just looks for video blackouts, which typify transition to/from commercial. Though this makes mistakes on dark shows/interludes, it's still amazingly good.
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IANAL, NDIPOOTV (I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV).
As it stands, it looks like automating the skipping process is what takes away the substantial non-infringing use claim for customers. (Of course, this is likely to change rapidly in the existing legal environment, but that looks to be the case for now).
The court should have recognized that being able to detect commercials automatically in the first place shouldn't have been possible at the accuracy the devices are capable of, unless broadcasters are themselves infringing on both laws and FCC regulations. For example, some of these devices detect differences in the peak or mean amplitude of the audio track. Others detect digital labeling originally used internally by the broadcast studios, and so are not just detecting commercials, but public service broadcasts, tests of the EBS, and station identification.
That last would not be necessary if local stations didn't sometimes broadcast 10 or 12 commercials in a row, broken up by a station identification segment to give a superficial legal defense against violating the FCC rulings.
That being the case, it's like a drug dealer going to court for taking a bad check. Their own violations mean they should not have standing to bring the lawsuits. Unfortunately, their own violations have been largely ignored by the system, which is often reluctant to enforce the law, and powerless to give FCC rules the full weight of law.
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Do commercials actually work? There's increasing evidence they don't. For example, there have been some new studies on movie theatre subliminal type methods, and the researchers announced that the old claim that they didn't influence behavior was actually wrong, but that they didn't influence behavior in the desired way, instead.
It seems that a quick subliminal picture of a Coca-cola product, for example, actually influences viewers a great deal. They apparently all get reminded to think about whether they are thirsty. Then they either decide they aren't, or go ahead and respond to their decision that they are. They go get water from the fountain, or buy a Coke, or buy a Lemonade, or decide not to pay movie theatre prices and wait until later.
By this model, subliminals don't increase Coke sales at all, but instead of people trickling up to the counter throughout the movie, more of them cluster in the times just after showing the commercial. They also still pick the brands they prefer, among the available alternatives.
Now what if regular commercials work the same way? You see a Geico ad, you think "I really do need car insurance. I think I'll compare their price with some local agents and make a final decision. Huummm, I wonder if Allstate can do any better? What was that insurance company that used to sponsor Wild Kingdom?", and so on.
Who is John Cabal?
The only way for stations to solve this commercial dillemaa is this.
Make it really, really easy to download commercials - then before every show show "trialers" for a few commercials related to the show. If these are done well enough then people would watch instead of skipping, and go somewhere else to view the full versions of thigns they liked.
I LOVED adCritic when it was free and I could look at whatever commercials I liked. Broadcasters (including cable on over the air stations) are really missing out by not making it so that I can look at a commercial when I want to, instead of when they think I should. As it is even if skipping is not in a product I can and do just leave or FF anyway, since I have no idea anything of any interest may be shown.
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