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

Oz Tivo

[mongrol]

Perhaps, Australia being upside down, Tivo make work the opposite and actually put decent programming onto the TV rather than take it off.

TV

[khazan]

It's almost enough to make me wish that I watched TV.

almost.

That's not like TiVo... it's like ReplayTV

[LostCluster]

The addition of volume-leveling and ad-skipping features seems to imply that this service is going to be closer to the original ReplayTV units rather than TiVo units... ReplayTV of course at one point in time was a sister company of the Rio brand of MP3 players and always has had a reputation of being the "screw the system" DVR as opposed to TiVo who co-operates with advertisers and broadcasters.

who wouldn't pay for no ads

[BoFiS]

I'd pay that just to have advertisements taken out of my daily TV...infact it's one of the main reasons I like the ReplayTV 4000-series, you can just have it skip the ads all-together.

And for those of you who enjoy commercial breaks so you can run and get more chips or ice cream...remember, you can always just pause it!

Lowering the volume on ads

[AmiMoJo]

Personally, I'd love a feature to automatically lower the volume on ads, to save me doing it manually.

I have noticed a disturbing trend on British cable TV channels where adverts are considerably louder than the main programmes, presumably to try and grab your attention. In reality, it's just annoying.

I normally channel surf or watch five minutes of a rolling news channel anyway, although now a lot of channels seem to have syncronised their ad breaks to try and stop you doing that. I expect such a feature would come under a lot of fire here (and probably in Aus too) from the very people who make it necessary.

One question though: how does it detect adverts?

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:Lowering the volume on ads

[pipingguy]

Actually the ads aren't louder but they do have more impact. This is mostly due to sound compression, where the softer parts of the ads are raised a few decibels in order to reduce the dynamic range of the sound.

This is true; the commercials effectively turn the volume of your television up to 11.

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:Smarter than a TiVo...

[rjch]

Of course, Austrailia has many fewer total over the air TV stations than the USA does thanks in part to its smaller geographic size, so this service is much more practical there than it is here.

Spoken like someone who has no idea where Australia is or has the slightest idea how big it is.

Australia is geographically the same size as the United States, even though it has 1/10th of the population. The fewer number of television stations (3 commercial, 2 government-owned and in some places 1 community) is driven in part by govenment regulation and in part by economics. A country of ~20 million people cannot support the same number of commercial stations as a country of ~200 million.

Pay TV only arrived in Australia 7 years ago and has only been accessible to most for the past 3-4 years. The ratings for Pay TV are pretty poor, since the commercial free-to-air stations have first pick at a lot of things - sport in particular - to protect people from "having" to pay for TV.

Im not sure if it will be a hit here..

[xxx_Birdman_xxx]

I'm in Australia, and to be honest, we dont really have that much free to air television. We have 5 main stations. One of them is the ABC (government funded), SBS a more multicultural tv station (partly gov funded I think) and three fully commercial stations. The ads we have are mostly on the commercial stations.
I dont think Australians are real heavy tv watchers, as pay-tv here is no where as popular as it is in other parts of the world. And if people dont want ads, they buy pay-tv services. I wouldn't pay a few dollars a week to record/filter ads from free to air tv. I mainly just turn it off.
So even thought I could see that this would have a market, I don't think it will be as big as Tivo in the American market.

Won't happen in New Zealand (Aussie's neighbour)

[NewtonsLaw]

While it would be nice to think that a similar service might be implemented here in New Zealand, the chances are virtually zero for one reason:

Copyright.

The TV broadcasters consider their program listings to be their intellectual property and that they're protected by copyright.

Similar copyright cases (both here and in Australia) have been won by the companies which publish other collections of data such as telephone directories (example)

Anyone who attempts to publish TV program schedules without the permission of the broadcaster (and they charge like wounded bulls for giving such permission) will be set upon by multiple teams of corporate lawyers.

Of course someone intent on providing a scheduling service for a Tivo-like system could always try and buy the rights to publish those listings but I bet you any money you like that those rights would come with the caveat that ad-blocking was forbidden. After all, advertising revenues are the lifeblood of a free-to-air broadcaster so they're not about to allow someone to provide a service that cuts ads are they?

Personally I think someone should fight the broadcasters over their copyright claims -- after all, copyright is supposed to protect the presentation, wording and format of data, not the facts on which that data is based.

If I create listings from scratch and simply include the program title, genre, start and finish times then that information should not be covered by any form of copyright.

But, fighting the corporate sharks costs lots of money so I doubt we'll see a test-case here in NZ anytime soon.

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