Let's hack television by getting rid of all commercials | Hacker News Reader

Let's hack television by getting rid of all commercials

maniacalscience.posterous.com

7 pointspiratelogic34 comments

"OK, I know what you’re thinking. Watching television is probably the most efficient way to waste your time."

OP then goes on to not even attempt to refute this. I'd rather watch television die completely and work on something more fun and useful.

I do not refute this, I simply try to play devil's advocate. In fact, I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't watch a lot of television because I enjoy being engaged in what I'm doing, but there are people out there who watch a lot of television and removing commercials could be a good thing for such people.

Let's hack television by ... not watching it at all.

Just imagine how much time you'll have to do stuff.

For those of us who get everything from iTunes/Netflix/etc, this happened already.

Beyond the personal time cost of commercials, there is a larger societal cost to commercials which is nigh-impossible to quantify. Swift-boat commercials kept Bush in office a second term, and soda commercials influence children towards obesity. They put perceived truth up for the highest bidder, and while they work imperfectly, billions would not be spend on ad campaigns every year if they did not yield the intended result, externalities be damned.

I'm not naive enough to think corporate and political propaganda would disappear without television advertisements. But for better and for worse, they create a stronger gravitational distortion in public awareness than all the other forms of propaganda combined.

You fail to address that most people time-shift television and skip commercials with their DVR.

I suppose you have a good point. I've never had DVR and don't know many people who have, so this was never an option for me. With that said, I feel obligated to point out that these people wouldn't need to skip the commercials if they didn't exist in the first place.

Data?

Uh.. "most people"? Maybe here on HN, but in the rest of the world out there? Doubtful.

This is one of those "my technology-phobic Mom does it" examples, so I'm guessing it's fairly common except for sports.

// Mom is a heavy duty NYY fan so I've seen both behaviors

If it's become common enough that Nielsen must also now report DVR views when they are reporting television ratings, then a significant chunk of the world is using DVR. It's why the networks don't treat shows with high DVR ratings the same way they treat shows with high live ratings: because DVR viewers skip commercials.

I remember when all the Stargate shows were cancelled. It was often pointed out that the DVR audience was still quite strong. So why did Syfy had to cancel? Because the DVR audience doesn't make them any money, and because the DVR audience is not in their live audience that does make them money. SG-1 went for ten seasons, but even SG-1 started losing the live audience to DVR.

And sure, you can say that a sci-fi show will have a more technologically oriented crowd, but it's telling that even the daytime soaps have been affected to the point that some of them, which have run for decades, have also been cancelled. Their audience didn't disappear. In fact, in an economy with slow job creation, their possible audience probably grew. But technology also changed, and now they could watch one soap on NBC and record the other on CBS. Well, they previously could at least, not anymore, since many soaps have been cancelled.

> You fail to address that most people time-shift television and skip commercials with their DVR.

The people who spent $68B on TV advertising last year will be sad to hear that.

This is measurably untrue. In Australia, for example, the level of playback, or time-shift, viewing is a very low, but increasing, percentage of total TV. Here in Australia we measure using an audio-signature match to track every minute of the day for television watched in the Nielsen panels. In the US, it is my understanding, that they actually track the commercials watched by way of a code inserted by the broadcasters into the commercial stream. Anyone skipping over the commercials would obviously not contribute to the ratings in such a system.

Television advertising is a multi-billion dollar business. Advertisers are extremely savvy, knowledgeable and are armed with plenty of statistically relevant data that proves that their advertising money isn't wasted.

This must be one of the most content-free blog posts I've read recently. Or did I miss something? I can't seem to find more meat than what's already stated in the title.

You might notice that it's also the only post on the site. I'm new at this. :)

Personally, I mute commercials, and I'd rather burn the energy to do that, than have my consciousness sucked away by being forced to listen to their drivel.

I only watch a really limited amount of TV anyway. Fringe, Big Bang Theory, local news, pretty much.

The hard part of this would be connecting some crowd-sourced mute intelligence to the actual mute button on the TV.

> The hard part of this would be connecting some crowd-sourced mute intelligence to the actual mute button on the TV.

Buy a cheap USB HDTV tuner. Install MythTV. Start watching all 1 hours shows 20 minutes late. Then let MythTV skip commercials for you automatically.

I laughed out loud. You are trying to curse me with MythTV!!!

Seriously though, I have run it, even debugged the channel changing under Linux and stopped it hanging up, but sadly I live out of range of a decent HDTV signal for right now.

You can hook up the tuner to your cable as well. Especially if it's digital cable.

"Now, I’m going to throw something out there that might seem kind of crazy."

You managed to write a blog post that hypes up your proposed solution to "hacking" TV...then don't even have a solution? You suggested that we get rid of commercials. That's not a solution, that's an idea everyone's had at some point.

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry and is an inherent facet of capitalism that can't just be "hacked" out of TV, whatever that means.

An idea everyone's had at some point but done nothing about can't be a solution?

No dude, think about what you're saying. The idea you've presented isn't a solution at all. Simply stating your desire to get rid of TV commercials without explaining how to do it is not a solution.

Nowdays TV became something not worth to have. All those movies, shows, news and popular scientific stuff you can find in the internet. I don't have TV set at home and It's great, no shows that make you stupid. Instead there is silence, good music or nice chat with people you live with. Ow, I like it so much. :D

To anyone that's interested: I've updated the article, taking some recommendations into account and I invite you all to give me one more shot.

This version provides a more detailed solution and discusses other companies such as YouTube and Netflix and how these companies are trying to solve the problem.

I always had the idea to do the reverse of what Shazam is doing with commercials now. Offer a feature to where you take a fingerprint of commercials and are able to fast forward through them. Obviously, Shazam has a bigger market of offering value add to advertisers.

There is actually some pretty good software that does this - it's just not very common because cable companies control the DVRs and they have to agree to rules set by the networks.

For example, the open sourice MythTV DVR does it. http://www.mythpvr.com/mythtv/taxonomy/term/4

Why not similarly - create a Chrome plugin - that clicks on all ads (for sites you visit) yet, does not display any?

Thereby funding the content you live, yet killing the ad-flocked web

Let's hack television by getting rid of television.

What the hell does "hacking the norm" even mean? What the do you mean "hack television". What does hacking even mean in this context? Is it a quick and dirty fix that addresses the main problems without heavy consideration of side effects, is it malicious action through unintended use, or is it a vague call to action?

All I see is the identification of a problem, and a half assed solution that doesn't even address the reason why the problem exists in the first place. If this what hacking is, then I don't want you, or anyone ever hacking that would effect me. I would settle for good old fashioned change

What the hell does "hacking the norm" even mean?

Anymore, I feel like "hacking" has simply become a generic verb for a person or project that wants to sound edgy.

Kind of reminds me of the term "hackathon" between my circle of friends. When the term first entered our lexicon, it specifically meant "a 24-hour software design and implementation competition in which participants form teams, chug unholy amounts of energy drinks, and show off their demos to the audience at the end of it all". It was brilliant, wondrous, and not a concept to be trifled with more than once every few months.

Slowly, very slowly, what was once a special event became, over time, "hey, I have a project idea we could work on together and no homework this weekend; hackathon Saturday?". That became "let's meet up Friday night for a hackathon and each figure out a project to work on until the morning". That became "I have some code I need to work on, and can't stay up past 4, but hackathon tonight anyway?". That became "fuck Maine, we need to get this CS lab done; dinner then hackathon for a few hours".

Et cetera, et cetera, until "hackathon" had become sufficiently bastardised at our hands so as to solely entail taking over a conference room of an academic building for two hours one night with four six packs of beer and loud music and not a single one of us even opening a text editor. After that incident, we finally looked back upon the previous year and understood how our flippant use of what was once a cool and exciting term had rendered it devoid of any real meaning.

For a while afterward, unless we were discussing an official sponsored event, we would make a point of only using the term facetiously as in "party hackathon tonight!" or "dinner hackathon at Subway".

Of course it's a half-assed solution, but why does that matter? This was simply a proposition and a call to action. If I this were actually a project of mine, don't you think I'd give it more thought?

EDIT: After giving it a second thought, perhaps "disrupt" would have been a better word to use than "hack". What do you think?

It's not TV. It's HBO.

Amen. With few exceptions, I refuse to waste my time with mediocre network and basic cable series.

I wonder why he didn't mention Netflix or Hulu or any other such service at all in that entire post.

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