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I was thinking of a device similar to a pi-hole for blocking TV commercials. It plugs into your TV's HDMI port and somehow as soon as a commercial starts it swi

• killlameme99 7y ago
  I know laziness sells, but really is it so bad to just click the mute button and turn on some music? I rarely watch TV these days but when I do I often sit with a different form of entertainment (music player, laptop, handheld video game system) and just switch to that during commercials. To me the real issue with commercials isn't the fact that they're selling me something, it's the fact that they're interrupting my entertainment. That will happen regardless of whatever pops up on my screen. In saying all that, I do like the concept. Perhaps video taping a show and removing the ads afterwards would have the optimal effect? Just googling around I seem to find some video taping software already has this feature, not sure how well it all works though.
  • monocasa 7y ago
    Unless I'm watching the muted commercials intently (which sort of defeats the purpose), I'll commonly miss the beginning of whatever show I was watching when it comes back from the commercial break. I'd really appreciate some automation to handle that for me.
• codetrotter 7y ago
  > Not really sure if it is feasible because it would have to have the smarts to distinguish between the actual tv show and a commercial but I'd play good money for something like this. If you live in the US, and broadcasts are delivered to you with IPTV, then reading about SCTE-35 might be of interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTE-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTE-35 Though I don’t know if these control messages are actually included in the video stream that is broadcast to the viewers, so it might be a dead end, but I think I read that at least some channels do include them in the broadcast stream. Might be worth looking into.
• o10449366 7y ago
  I pay for TV (not by choice, bundled into my internet), but I still watch the illegal sports streams because the video quality is just as good and the streamers automatically block out the commercials during the breaks. I also get to watch with Twitch chat and can easily rewind the stream if I miss a big play. Television is an awful way to consume media.
• woodruffw 7y ago
  > it would have to have the smarts to distinguish between the actual tv show and a commercial but I'd play good money for something like this Pre-CALM[1], you might have been able to use the relative volume change to detect ads. Not sure if that will work anymore. Some kind of visual/audio fingerprinting might work best these days, collecting information about new ads in the process. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudness_Mitigation_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
  • cgriswald 7y ago
    I was thinking along the same lines. In response to CALM they started basically maxing out the sounds of the commercials. Technically they’re no louder than the loudest part of the program but it’s ALL that loud so it sounds like they’re yelling at you. I don’t know how easy that would be to detect versus a loud sequence in a show, but I think detecting it as one metric amongst others would be doable.
• exlurker 7y ago
  Yes, yes, yes, yes! I dream about the same thing. And an overlay with a light gun to shoot holes in whatever's on. And this device could do some processing, like SETI, or whatever other useful thing.
• robmiller 7y ago
  I wonder if you could repurpose the mythflagcommercials process from MythTV to do this. It has a variety of methods to detect commercial breaks.
  • Zombieball 7y ago
    This came to mind as well great suggestion. I haven’t used MythTV in years but I remember it being quite decent at commercial detection. Sometimes it missed the boundary between show and commercial by 1-2s, but otherwise was great. (I bet they check for volume changes as one of the algorithms)
    • upofadown 7y ago
      The big problem with MythTV commercial detection is that transitions that fool the algorithm into cutting off some of the desired content will almost always fool you too. It's fairly rare, but you might not even realize that it happened, only that the plot seems disjointed or incomplete. I suspect that other commercial skipping systems would have the same problem.
• SimonPStevens 7y ago
  The easiest way to achieve this is just don't watch live. I honestly don't remember the last time I watched actual live TV. I just recorded it and watch it later, then fast forward through all the ads. Even if I'm watching it the same night, I'll just sit down to watch it slightly late, so I've got enough of a buffer to skip the ads, and catch back up to live by the end of the show.
  • mattmanser 7y ago
    Surely a computer can do that in sub-second time? As soon as it sees the signature of a well known advert start blocking. Then again, what about clips from the show that you're watching, it might start blocking part of the show as it thinks it's an advert.
    • tyingq 7y ago
      Plex says this about their commercial removing tech: "The process is CPU-intensive and can take several minutes to complete, depending on the recording duration. On a reasonably fast CPU, we typically see a 30-minute recording take 2-4 minutes to process." Assuming they know what they are doing, real time blocking seems not possible with a reasonably modern approach.
      • ses1984 7y ago
        What leads you to believe that something that can process a 30 minute file in 3 minutes, can't be done in real time?
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • tyingq 7y ago
          Maybe more context: "The recording is analyzed on various characteristics such as black frames, silences and changes in aspect ratio. Based on this information Comskip segments the recording in blocks and using heuristics, together with additional information such as the presence of logo, the scene change rate, Close Captioning information and other information sources Comskip tries to determine what blocks of the recording are to be characterized as commercials." It doesn't say it explicitly, but based on this and the note on high CPU utilization, I get the impression it has to look back and forward to determine where the commercial is.
• brightball 7y ago
  TiVo does this in many cases if you turn on the parental controls. It will hide the commercials if it isn’t sure what the rating is. On recorded shows it also has a skip commercials function on most of them as well. By far the best way to watch TV these days IMO.
• seaneganx 7y ago
  This seems awfully specific, but people are already working on this full time [1]. Their hardware detects the commercials and swaps them out for content of your choosing. Seems like it's targeted toward businesses who want to show their own ads instead of commercials. [1] https://taiv.tv/ https://taiv.tv/
  • npalansky 7y ago
    I actually run the team behind this - really cool to see it come up here! It's a much harder problem than it sounds like at first. Our solution uses custom hardware and a lot of AI and has taken our 4 person team over 9 months to build. We are b2b for now, but that could always change. Hopefully we'll have some big updates to share soon!
• sephamorr 7y ago
  There was a project that did exactly this, I'll see if I can find the link, most of the work was spent stripping HDCP. The key heuristic in ad detection is that (at least in 2014) there is usually a single black frame between content and advertisements, and ads are rarely transmitted with more that stereo audio, while most content comes as 5.1 or 7.1 channels, even if it is a naive upscale.
• robbiep 7y ago
  I haven’t had an arial lead for my tv for a long time but have an Apple TV and so have actually been watching commercial tv through that (the tv app aggregates all shows so you can use it as a bit of a TV guide, and it seems to come preloaded with the app for each of the Australian stations). I haven’t configured this setup, but when I watch the shows delayed on my pc (on delay, not live) the ads are blocked due to my browser ad blocking - which shortens the overall length of the show as they seem to be injected rather than part of the stream
• JudgeWapner 7y ago
  people haven't yet mentioned simple audio fingerprinting. You would have to have a button to press the first time you saw the ad, so you would have to listen to the ad at most once. But since most ads are 15, 30, or 1m, it would be sufficient to take the audio and fingerprint it, like they do with shazam for songs. I dont think that's very CPU intensive, but it does require the manual tagging step.
• city41 7y ago
  I especially want something like this for nhl.tv (hockey games streamed) they literally play a sole commercial about 20 to 30 times a game. The same commercial gets used for about 5 games too. It’s borderline torture. I’ve gotten very good at muting.
• mabbo 7y ago
  Coordinated agents could probably do well at this. You and your neighbor may not be seeing the same ads[0]. The cable companies and advertising companies can show each subscriber something different on the same channel. But they only do that during ad time- when more customized content is a way to make money. During the show, they're currently incentivized to show you both the same content. Even if this type of thing isn't going on, it's been obvious for 20 years that some ad time is given to local ads vs national ads. All we need then is a system where each member shares some small hash of what they're seeing on this channel every second or so. When the group sees their hashes diverge, it's ad-time. Turn on your relaxing music. So long as this doesn't become too common, the cable networks would have a hard time changing their behavior to try to fight this. They make too much additional money with the customized advertising. [0]When I was a Google intern almost a decade ago, another intern explained to me that her division of Google had bought out 100% of the ad time on a cable network and resold the ad time with targeted customer demographics, making a profit doing so. I can only imagine how crazy the targeting systems are now.
• rahimnathwani 7y ago
  The NeTV board by Bunnie Huang is intended for use cases like this: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5308 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5308 It would sit between your set-top box and your TV, analysing the incoming HDMI signal, changing things in the video stream, and then outputting the new signal to the TV.
• wolco 7y ago
  They broadcast a code at the start and end of the ad segment for networks. I have vcr from 1996 that skips ads. Once it saves the recording it rewinds and fast forwards until it finds the ad marks it. When viewing an ad it automatically fast forwards. RCA
• usefulcat 7y ago
  Maybe if the hypothetical device had access to closed captioning? The idea being that the closed captioning text for commercials should be easily recognizable.
• ThinkBeat 7y ago
  ReplayTV a precursor to Tivo had this funciontaity back in 2000. It did it very well. So this is a solved problem. and they did it with simple hardware. They did get sued into bankrupcy for it