Google's New Patent on Commercial Breaks

theodp writes "What could be more annoying than having ads precede online videos? How about having commercials interrupt the videos? That's the premise behind a newly-published Google patent application for Using Viewing Signals in Targeted Video Advertising."

Comments

Sounds like an abuse cool technology

[ccguy]

The interesting part of the patent is not that they interrupt the video to show a commercial (surely there is prior art on that), but rather than the commercial breaks are determined automatically by analyzing the video and audio (detecting scene changes for example).

Also, they gather 'interaction data' with the first commercial, and use it for the following ones.

There's a bidding system to buy advertisement slots on specific video, so if there's a very hot video in say, youtube, you can put your commercial there almost inmediately... seems like the best way to maximize advertising costs.

Re:Sounds like an abuse cool technology

[namgge]

...so if there's a very hot video in say, youtube, you can put your commercial there almost inmediately... seems like the best way to maximize advertising costs.

Quite so. Far better to adopt VW's approach: make an entertaining advert and stick it on youtube in its own right. Then people can watch it without it being interupted by some film,

Namgge

I hope they are patenting this to..

[the_rajah]

just sit on the patent to keep anyone from doing it. They do promise to do no evil, right?