Technology changed product placement | Hacker News Reader

Technology changed product placement

engadget.com

14 pointspjl4 comments

In the late 90's I had a Battlebots team and we made it to the televised finals several times (and we were on Robotica a TLC show). The interesting bit was that if you were on national TV, you could get a sponsor who would, in exchange for their logo being on your T-shirt, provide consulting and sometimes components for your robot. It was an interesting negotiation with the production company as to whether or not they would 'blur out' the logos or not.

This technology would let them make their own deal with some company and put that logo on their instead, even if the competitor didn't like the team. Can you imagine Nascar where the lead car always has an STP Oil Additive sticker? That would make it hard for a competitor to negotiate with sponsors, or perhaps even get sponsorship. Code that erases the Nike 'swoosh' in every frame? No problem.

It also is interesting that it can cut Google out of the loop. I've wondered how Google deals with people who put their own "direct" advertisement in their Youtube videos while Google tries to monetize them with popup ads. Does Google start blurring those 'integrated' ads out?

Going to be interesting, that is for sure.

It is an interesting concept when applied to large groups (e.g. different countries get different adverts), however I struggle to see how it would be applied to smaller groups (e.g. age ranges, genders, etc) like the article suggests.

Be it music videos, TV shows, or movies they're all delivered, right now, to single large groups of people all at once. Almost every delivery medium (e.g. YouTube, Cable TV, iTunes, etc) would need to have on-hand two dozen different versions to make sure everyone gets their most appropriate ad. Seems unrealistic.

I wouldn't say this kind of dynamic advertising is impossible, but the technical hurdles to deliver different content to different groups seems extremely costly and complex.

So we might see some of this in the coming years, but the hopes of this company are clearly unrealistic.

PS - This is clearly a press release by Mirriad (the company behind this)

It is not really all that hard to create all of the combinations for various ads. You can cache the optical flow[1] analysis of the source video. The optical flow won't change since it is determined by the source video. Then you layer in your ad projection, render with final result with the ad and the source video together and finally concatenate the rest of the video that didn't require projection.

Being that the screen time for these ads is quite short in comparison to the entire video, and the start and end times of visibility would be known for each ad placement you can just splice together the actual targeted video and not worry about the other parts of the video that don't have placements. Of course Mirriad may not be so heavily optimized yet in the workflow, but hey, they'll get there and it is only a few perl scripts with calls to ffmpeg anyways.

As for the servers needing to store different versions of the video a few points:

1. Storage is cheap, bandwidth or CPU is expensive. And we're billing the advertiser. Re-rendering videos for adaptive streaming is a cheap cost and there isn't generally a real time requirement. 2. If you don't want to store multiple versions and are using HLS for streaming delivery, you can just splice together the playlist of multiple optical flow rendered segments with EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY.

The problem is delivery via Youtube and being able to do fine grained consumer targeting. It would be better to be self hosted so you can use the various consumer targeting services like BlueKai and not have to build an entire segmentation platform.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow

Jokes from 90's animated comedies coming true.

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