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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"). "
I wish I could 'automagically' skip parts of my life I got bored with/didn't want to endure.
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?
MythTV has had this feature for awhile and it can be set to automatically skip commercials so you dont have to press a button to skip them.
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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Sorry, but the networks have no inherent RIGHT to make money. It's wonderful if they can, but if they feel they are loosing money due to commerical skipping then maybe their business model isn't viable anymore and they need to think about change. Nothing makes me more enraged than corporations that seek protection from congress rather than adapting to new market conditions.
So, as people switch to skipping commercials, we will probably see a huge push in product placement in new tv shows. Hell, I was watching some movie channel the other day, and the people who introduced the movie also doubled as salesmen, trying to push some random product on me.
Looking forward to seeing bart's room covered in butterfinger wrappers.
no
I welcome the ability for people to skip commercials or advertisements for the simple reason that they fail to deliver on their goal. They only seem to annoy people and motivate them to switch channels.
/ads are repeated over and over again. If I wasn't interested the first time, then I doubt I will be the 100th time. This is the same way with SPAM. I get 3 offers a day for the same useless products. One thing I really hate about Discovery channel (and others) is that they only have about a dozen commercials that they play over and over and over again.
If a commercial / ad actually imparts information or entertainment value, then I enjoy and look forward to it, the first couple times. Too many commercials
It is unfortunate that advertisers believe (and possibly rightfully so) that consumers are more likely to purchase a product if they are repeatedly exposed to an ad that does not actually provide information about the product, but instead annoys the heck out of them due to content or frequency of occurrence.
Much like elections, it usually comes down to name recognition.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
I own a TiVo, and I understand the benefits of skipping ads. However, I don't think this is what DVRs so compelling. Time shifting a show (watching a football almost live from the start after missing the 1st quarter) and season passes (TiVo: Record all new Simpsons episodes and save them all until I delete them. And start the recording a minute early & end it a minute late) are much more useful. When I'm watching something intently, skipping ads is great; when I'm watching TV while doing something else, it sometimes is more of a pain than its worth-- sometimes I fell like I *have* to skip ads.
Commercial skipping is nice nonetheless, although I'm not sure how useful automatic skipping is; I'e never tried it. TiVo also has the ability to skip 30-second chunks of shows. Just start playing something from "Now Playing." Press Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. You'll hear 3 "dings." Now when you press the "jump-to-live" button, you'll skip 30 seconds at a time. You have to repeat this procedure if the TiVo gets rebooted.
I remember back in the late 1980s listening to my parents and their disgust at commercial television stations now having up to THREE advertisements in ad spots, when before it was one, or maybe two on a slow night.
Now, on pay television and free to air, I'm seeing 8-12 advertisements in each slot, and massive amounts of the shows I watch being cut out. Last time I watched X-Files (only because I know it used to be 43 minutes per episode when first shown) the entire show was cut down to 35 minutes. that's eight minutes of the show I want to watch gone, and over 80 advertisements.
Now. What's the difference? What's so pricey nowadays that requires so many advertisements constantly?
Pricey reality television shows. blah.
Unfortunately, skipping does not mean the end of commercials, just commercials as we know them.
Subtle and not so subtle product placements will ensure that we continue to see advertising every time we watch TV, despite our best efforts.
I suggest listening to public streaming radio (in ogg format no less) as a wonderful alternative to the tripe Madison avenue continues to shove down your throat.
Unless you like tripe. Whatever floats your boat.
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If that were possible and it caught on with even mild success, you would simply see commercials integrated with the programs - kinda like back in the what, 40s? Not that the programs are much different from commercials now, anyway.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
It should be easy to identify commercials for skipping. They are the blocks of broadcast time that don't have the Broadcast Flag set.
Of course this is why the media industry sued ReplayTV into oblivion. Cut out the ads and you significantly cut their revenue and ability to produce the shows. Too bad cable/satellite TV isn't more like the current state of satellite radio -- way fewer ads per program hour! Paying for cable TV seems to only get me more ads targeted to my demographic group.
While nearly all of us who have PVR's enjoy the ability to skip screaming car salesmen, corporate drug pushers (pharmaceutical companies), incredibly heart warming financial companies touting their trustwothiness, etc. etc. et. all ad nauseum, eliminating them from our entertainment will be all but impossible. In fact, by eliminating the containerized thirty or sixty second ads, we'll instead get blasted by pop-ups and embedded product placements, etc., AND the traditional commercial. In fact, it is already happening. To wit:
Disney owns ABC, ESPN and the Discovery Channel. How often on ESPN does one see "the stars" of that great new hit on ABC? How often does ABC tout programs on ESPN? And now, Discovery is in the act too, offering us "documentaries" on the magic behind Disney World in Orlando. And of course, who owns Disney World? Disney.
Films made by Sony's studios almost always feature Sony equipment when a given character is using his or her PC. Also, the word "SONY" is often in huge black letters on the rear of a monitor, even though they aren't usually so prominent on the products shipped to Joe Consumer from the factory.
Add to that the PAID product placements like Coca-Cola being drunk by a given character. There are many of those.
And finally, the grand-daddy of product advertising discguised as content: NASCAR. Each car is festooned with no less than twenty different sponsors, starting with the make and model of the auto being raced (even they have exactly one part in common with their street version: the roof panel) plus the major sponsor of the driver, plus the minor sponsor plus all the super-minor sponsors not the least of which is NACAR itself. The whole race is a rotating advertisement, one which the competitors are trying not only to beat each other but also to gain the most exposure time for their sponsors. A higher position on the track means more "impressions" for the sponsors on the viewers. Best of all, when a driver is interviewed, he thanks 1) God 2) his crew and of course his sponsors for painting his "Folger's/Viargra/Ford/Taurus" in their colors. The entire event is, in short, an ad.
That's direction we're headed. Like death, taxes and Microsoft security flaws, one simply cannot avoid marketing. It's simply more malleable than are the viewers or listeners of a given content.
Automatic commercial skipping has been around for years. I had the capability on a VCR that I had about 8 years ago. The way it works is that the device looks for the completely black screen that preceeds the commercial and the resumption of the show. Next time you're watching a show, pay attention to that transition and you'll see it. It apparently never happens at other times (well, hardly ever: my VCR was fooled once in a great while by something in the middle of a show or string of commercials). If my Tivo had something like that, it'd be even more awesome (but, the manual skipping using the remote ain't that bad as it is).
Has anyone ever based a multi-thousand dollar car purchase on a car ad they saw? I'm sure some ad exec would bend over backwards trying to make some tenuous psychological argument about "sub conscious choices" or "product awareness" but I think car makers just waste a hell of a lot of money in the end.
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Older (and now the really new) ReplayTVs have automatic commercial skip. The technology detects the brief black screen before and after the commercial breaks and skips over them automatically.
For me, it works most of the time. The times it doesn't is typically during shows with a lot of black gaps like 24 and Law & Order.
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.
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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MythTV also has this feature built in.
I cannot emphasize just how cool this project is - it has all the features you'd expect from a modern DVR, and many more besides. It's open-source and immensely configurable. For example:
I also decided I'd like to be able to transfer recorded programs to my machine at work and watch them there, so I hacked up a little script to re-encode them at 100kbps, and added a "Watch Now" link to the MythWeb HTML web interface.
The other day my wife was complaining that the fonts on the screen were too small, so I tweaked the XML configuration file to bump them up a bit.
Thanks to LIRC, I can pretty much use any remote I like to control the box. I'm using an ancient, spare TV remote right now, and I can map the buttons whichever way I like.
It'll also optionally rip DVDs and CDs, enabling you to play them from the hard drive. It will also play pretty much any video file you have (through MPlayer). If I want to show the wife a movie trailer that I've downloaded from the internet, I just copy it over to the MythTV box, and she can watch it on the television.
Let's see you do all *that* with a Tivo!
Is to get rid of your television. No purchase or installation required :).
For years I thought television, even cable was crap, but I let myself be held hostage by "that one good show".
Back in June I moved and I decided to leave the TV behind on purpose.
To be honest, every once in a blue moon I miss the tube.
However, in the balance I read more, get more sleep, I get more exercise, see my friends more, study more, go out....in short, I have more of a life.
I still watch DVDs of some good movies....and even "that one good show" on PC.
Steve
Why not use several methods to determine if there's a commercial?
1. The blackout interval. Sometimes though, like on Frasier there's blackouts during the program.
2. The audio levels
3. Closed captioning. Are commercials closed captioned? I haven't goofed off with CC settings for a while. My advent tv seems to have several of them.
4. network bug detection.
Perhaps using a combination of the 4 above can do perfect commercial skippage. Then have it make a small database of which times it skipped commercials a day/week before to give it a general guideline on when to do it again.
Take your anti-spam tech and use it towards tv commercials.
Wasn't it several years ago that the cast of Friends each were getting paid $1 million per episode?
That's $6 mill per, by my math. That'll certainly up the costs of TV these days. Ask a TV actor from the 80s if they made even 1/10th of that.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
many years ago and way back when, there was an FCC requirement that there was to be a minimum of a 1 second fade to total black leaving the program and going into a commercial and the same was to be applied leaving the commercial and going back into the program.
Of course this rarely happened due to the fact that college kids were running the place as interns and there was a *lot* of screwing up..
Anyway, I had been working on a circuit that would monitor the video stream for the fade to black and would mute the volume automagically on live TV. (This was about 20 years ago though.)
You would be amazed at the information that's encoded into a video stream that you can't see without special equipment. It's neat as hell. We used to send stuff out, like text messages in the VBI that only other techs could get. The FCC would have shit if they had known what was going on back then..
Anway, The point is that you can design circuits that KNOW (or are supposed to know) when commercials start and end and take action based on that. But it's not fool proof, it depends on the broadcaster sticking to the rules, and they rarely do...
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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networks say that the 30-second-skip is an infringing device under the DMCA because there is no substantial non-infringing use for a thirty-second skip ahead
It wasn't the 30 second skip that got RePlay in trouble, which is why the new RePlays (55xx) still have it, as do many VCR's. The older RePlays (50xx) had a feature called commercial skip, that by hitting a checkbox before playing the show would automatically skip commercials. It uses periods of fade to black to determine what it skips
I have a 5060, and I don't use comercial skip all that often, because it tends to confuse fade-to-black as part of a show, like those location screens in law and order, with commercials. It works well for shows that don't do that, however.
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I am a die hard Tivo user, (I think all TiVo users are actually Die Hard users). My Tivo ship s 30 seconds ahead too with a single button press on the remote. It is not a feature that TiVo ever even mentions or supports, but it is there. You simply have to press SELECT PLAY SELECT 3 0 SELECT on the remote, (providing that you have unlocked the backdoor), Backdoor Unlock Fact Sheet. Then your skip to end button acts as a 30 second skip instead. No need to add software or get out a screw driver. Works Great! Doing it this way, I believe, obsolves the TiVo manufacturer of the liability.
Yeah, but what does it do when you're watching an info-mercial? ;)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Perhaps if everyone starts skipping over the commericals television will change.
... oh, wait...
I can see it now. A form of television where you pay a monthly fee to watch and get commerical free tv. Wonderful, high quality programing, both educational and entertaining. Our minds will be expanded, our horizons broadened. Our children will be enlightened. The level of "culture" in our society will rise to new highs. There will be a great renewal in the arts.
Dare we say another Renaissance?
No longer will the programing be dictated by Madison Avenue. No longer will we be forced to wade through the sewage spewing out into our living rooms. Garbage aimed at the lowest comon denominator because there have to be a certain number of the right kind of people watching who will buy product-X.
Mindless.
Boring.
Crap.
I can see it now, a reliable, high quality signal that never fails. That carries content on demand. A beautiful picture, high definition, perfect concert quality sound.
Perhaps instead of being broadcast the signal will even come into your house on some kind of cable
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Knoppix with Myth TV pre installed/configured.
One could say that is very, very close to what you asked for.
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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