I am always amazed, amongst the shrinking group of people who still watch broadcast TV, how many of them don't reflexively hit Mute when the ads come on.
I've done it my entire life.
I've done it my entire life.
I think advertisers have been dialing up the attention grabbing features over the years, and those constantly exposed don’t notice. Those who haven’t been watching now experience being exposed to the equivalent of ten babies crying for your attention. It’s truly and attack on your senses and sanity, but you have to remove yourself from it for a time to see how bad it is.
Could even put some federated learning into the bag for a slight dystopian flavour - and that sweet VC allure - to also listen to people hitting mute & unmute as a semi-reliable labelling feature. Just sample the time window recording of the frequency spectrum and it may be good enough already.
It wouldn't be foolproof but just good enough I guess. I'd be willing to pay 200$ for a ad silencing IR transmitter with >90% recall.
That's what (used to?) happen to music during the so-called loudness war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
The apparent rise in amplitude is horribly annoying; but I understand that actually increasing the volume during ad-breaks is forbidden (at least in the UK). Instead, they tailor the audio spectrum to create psycho-acoustically the impression of increased loudness.
Automated ad-filtering on broadcast TV seems to be a hard problem. Some filters look for the channel logo screen at the start and end of the ad-break; but (a) you have to set up each channel; (b) "sponsors" now book slots at the start and end of the break, before and after the channel-logo screen.
The best solution I've found is to record anything I want to watch in advance; then to skip forward 5 minutes when the break starts, and FF/RW if I land in the wrong place. I'm a bit surprised that so many people seem to be buying big-screen TVs, but apparently not STBs with hard-disk recorders.
The device you would pay $200 for used to cost $40: https://bgr.com/general/mute-tv-commercials-automatically-ho...
One approach that occurred to me is to take advantage of the fact that same ads are played in different TV shows.
Suppose you record hundreds or thousands of hours of TV video/audio, then compare it to your program guide data.
In theory, you should be able to detect that some segments of the video/audio correlate very strongly with what show you're watching (occurring only there), whereas other segments of video/audio appear all over the place in different programs.
And use fingerprinting to avoid having to store/transmit all that video/audio data.
This is not that different from what Shazam does with music recognition, although their job is easier because their audio data is naturally segmented into songs, whereas for ad detection you have to find segments. But I bet there are algorithms to efficiently find common sub-sequences (maybe from DNA bioinformatics?).
Once you have fingerprints of commercials, you distribute a database of these to viewers, and their device uses it to detect commercials while watching.
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For programs that air more than once, you could invert this and look for segments of video/audio that are common between the airings. The rest is more likely to be commercials, especially if you've got a movie that airs on different networks.
Or if you can see a show/movie through on-demand, maybe you'll get different commercials on repeated viewings.
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Another approach is facial recognition. If you see Flo from Progressive, it's probably an ad. You can maybe even recognize new, unknown ads this way.
If you want to go really crazy, mine IMDB for TV/movie titles, the cast that appear in each, and their photos, then recognize non-ad video footage based on who you know is supposed to be in that episode.
"Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen fragen Sie Ihren Arzt oder Apotheker."
which translates to:
"Concerning risks and side effects please ask your doctor or pharmacist."
It's like pestering users with alerts. After a certain point, you can't really blame someone for tuning them out and just clicking OK.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struc...
(Hard to find a nice source for this because there's a metaphor going around now about covid vaccines and lightning, but I saw it around more at the time. If anyone is better at search engines with date filtering or has a super reputable link, please share it below)
Now, here in The Netherlands with my KPN TV-over-fiber connection, I can skip around in a show, but I can't skip over ads on many channels. The device sometimes doesn't even let me mute during an ad! I can independently mute or switch video inputs, so it's basically forcing me to either hear or see an ad.
I pay about the same for Netflix. So obnoxious.
Therefore, I got very good at mentally tuning ads out. I can watch an ad 100 times yet not be able to tell you what they said, what happened in it, or what product it's for.
Sometimes I mute now, but only when the ad is top 10% annoying. It's often easier to just tune out the ads than to remember to unmute.
My mother had a really obnoxious attitude towards the television. Probably because of this I don't have a TV at all and am always suprised by the amount of people who immediately notice when they visit my house.
Called out my dentist on this and he listened.