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That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data. And all that i
by nitwit005 10mo ago
That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data.
And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?
- marbro 10mo ago[dead]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo agoI assume these systems are calculating an on device perceptual hash. So not that much data needs get flown back to the mothership.
- nemomarx 10mo agoI don't think they mean that kinda streamer - the idea is the roku tv can tell you're watching an ad even if it's on amazon prime, apple tv, youtube, twitch, wherever, and associate the ad watching with your roku account to potentially sell that data somehow? That way they aren't cut out of the loop by you using a different service to watch something and still have a 'cut'.
- nitwit005 10mo agoIt'd make sense if they're using streamer in a different sense than I'm used to. I see that's at the bottom of the definitions Google will produce.
- nemomarx 10mo agoYeah I think they mean "user of a streaming service" here, which would more conventionally be user or watcher or so on.
- htrp 10mo agoAttribution is very painful and advertisers will pay lots of money to close that loop.
- bequanna 10mo agoThe actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity. Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
- autoexec 10mo ago> The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity. this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
- SubiculumCode 10mo agoI thought that similar inputs do not give similar hashes..but apparently that is cryptographic hashing. Locality-Sensitive Hashing methods (e.g. Perceptual hashing[1]) makes similar inputs have similar hashes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
- bequanna 10mo agoAh, bingo, yes! I should have been more specific in my comment. Perceptual hashing allowsfor higher similarity scores between similar looking images. Lots of cool techniques to experiment with. Highly recommend playing around if you’re interested.
- SubiculumCode 10mo agoI immediately did a little exploration for potential utility in neuroimaging analyses...not that anything was immediately obvious to me, but I love learning about things like this.
- Spooky23 10mo agoYou only need to grab a few pixels or regions of the screen to fingerprint it. They know what the stream is and can process it once centrally if needed.
- klik99 10mo agoAre there video "thumbprints" like exists for audio (used by soundhound/etc) - IE a compressed set of features that can reliably be linked in unique content? I would expect that is possible and a lot faster lookup for 2 frames a second. If this is the case, the "your device is taking a snapshot every 30 seconds" sounds a lot worse (not defending it - it's still something I hope can be legislated away - something can be bad and still exaggerated by media)
- woodson 10mo agoThere are perceptual hashing algorithms for images/video/audio (dsp and ML based) that could work for that.
- tshaddox 10mo agoGiven that the TV is trying to match one digital frame against another digital frame, you could probably get decent results even with something super naive like downsampling to a very low resolution, quantizing the color palette, then looking for a pixel for pixel match. All this could be done long before any sort of TV-specific image processing, so the only source of "noise" I can think of would be from the various encodings offered by the streaming service (e.g. different resolutions and bitrates). With the right choice of downsample resolution and color quantization I have to imagine you could get acceptable results.
- paradox460 10mo agoThat's basically what phash does
- Rediscover 10mo agoI've been led to believe those video thumbprints exist, but I know the hash of the perceived audio is often all that is needed for a match of what is currently being presented (movie, commercial advert, music-as-music-not-background, ...).
- 10mo ago
- micromacrofoot 10mo agoit's hashed on the tv then they compare hashes in aggregate
- vrosas 10mo agoI used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e. a company that bid on TV ad spots in real time. The bidding platform was handling millions of requests per second, and we were one of the smaller fish in the sea. This system is very real. Your tv is watching what you’re watching. I built the attribution pipeline, which is what this is. If you go buy a product from one of these ads, this is how they track (attribute) it. Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
- Ancalagon 10mo agoI understand the perils of a capitalist system but whyyy would you agree to build this
- nospice 10mo agoIt makes its creator the money they can spend buying the products they see in TV ads.
- cephi 10mo agoIf someone is going to get paid to build it anyway, I might as well be the one getting paid for it.
- Sharlin 10mo agoYeah, there are reasons why "someone is going to do it anyway" is a classic example of an ethically unsound argument.
- torstenvl 10mo agoIt isn't ethically unsound. It's a commons/coordination problem. What is the optimal strategy in infinite-round prisoners dilemma with randomized opponents? The randomization effectively makes it an infinite series of one-round prisoners dilemma. So the best strategy is always to defect. The only way you can change this is very high social trust, and all of society condemning anyone who ever defects.
- airza 10mo agoIs it? I don’t think you need particularly high fidelity to fingerprint ads/programs.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoNot necessarily, it can be done on-device, the screenshot hashed, and the results deduplicated and accumulated over time, then compressed and sent off in a neat package. It'd still be a huge amount of data when you add it all up, but not too different from the volume that e.g. web analytics produces. Then server-side the hash is matched to a program or ad and the data accumulated and reduced even further before ending up in someone's analytics dashboard.
- alias_neo 10mo agoThat's the thing about scaling; you offload the work to the "client" (the TV in this case) and make it do the work, it need not send back more than a simple identifier or string in an API call (of course they'll send more), so they get to use a little bit of your electricity and your TVs processing power to collect data on you and make money, with relatively little required from them, other than some infra to handle the requests, which they would have had anyway to collect the telemetry that makes them money. Client side processing like this is legitimate and an excellent way to scale, it just hits a little different when it's being used for something that isn't serving you, the user. source: backend developer
- ozim 10mo agoConfirming how many people actually seen the ad is worth big bucks. No one wants to pay for ads they cannot confirm and publisher can make up impressions - if you can catch publisher making up numbers you might get a huge discount or loads of money back.