TiVo-Like Service Coming To Australia

rosy writes with good news for Australian television watchers: "CNET.com.au is reporting that a TiVo-like service will be available in November this year. Dubbed ICE ("Intelligent Content Engine") and developed by Peter Vogel, the technology will be built into set top boxes and personal video recorders to skip ads or lower the volume, view electronic program guides, etc. The article states that the service will cost $2-3 per week with the service launching initially in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong."

Comments

For the masses, maybe.

[rjch]

...for those of us who read Slashdot, the question becomes "why?" I've had a PVR at home for the past four or five months, ever since I built my MythTV system with KnoppMyth.

With some old leftover hardware and a $150 TV card, it was ridiculously easy to set up, even though a little Linux experience did help. Sure, the commercial detection is "programmed" and prone to miss commercials or (on occasion) think that the program itself is the commercial, but when it's free and includes most, if not all of what these PVR boxes will, having that "up-to-the-second" information isn't really all that vital.

Re:Lowering the volume on ads

[silentbozo]

One question though: how does it detect adverts?

There are two methods that I know of. The first is to measure the sound volume - breaks for advertising often will have a pause in audio, then the actual advertising audio level will usually be higher than the programming audio. There was actually such a project (muting audio from commercials automatically) featured in an electronics magazine a number of years back - try looking up back issues of Popular Electronics.

The second way is to measure the video signal in much the same way as you would audio. There used to be a blanking interval as the advertisments were cut into the program feed. ReplayTV relies on this, along with the MPEG scene-detection algorithms to determine when a scene starts and stops, and whether that scene is likely to be an advertisement.

Of course, TV stations are wise to this these days. ReplayTV units often have problems detecting commercials because of the stupid station ID logo burned into the screen - this prevents the screen from going totally black, which usually signals a commercial (not always - I've had my ReplayTV mistakenly cut out a chunk of the program because there was a lightning effect). Also, TV stations have begun putting in sidebars and strips at the top and bottom for advertising and junk messages, which also spoils the commercial detection algorithm, and cross-dissolve to commercials, which eliminates a pause in either the video or audio.

Checking the sound level seems to be the best bet, and if you can couple that with scene detection, and some sort of intelligent algorithm that figures out that the next 5 scenes are a collection of 30 sec and 1 min spots, and are likely to be commercials, that, I think is the way to go. Of course, if you want to do that, you'd probably have to buffer the programming, which then precludes you from channel surfing.

Re:About time -- but will it be legal?

[skribe]

Well from what I recall living in Australia, its perfectly legal to record a show to watch later as long as you don't go around distributing the copy.

Actually, that is not correct. According to this pdf document you need permission from all the copyright holders to legally copy a television show in Australia. There are exceptions (such as educational purposes) but they don't include for personal use only. This still hasn't stopped millions of VCRs (note the R for recorder) from being sold in this country. I doubt it will stop the Aussie version of the Tivo.

For more information of Australian copyright I suggest The Australian Copyright Council.

skribe