How To Remove Ads from YouTube Videos

Simple. Except for the pre-roll.

Art Project Removes Logos From Videos, Photos

"Unlogo is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos." An art project by Jeff Crouse, it is, technically speaking, "an FFMPEG AVFilter that attempts to block out corporate logos using OpenCV 2.1 and an awesome 'plugin' framework for FFMPEG." Unlogo is open sourced; its code-in-progress is available here.

The artist also talks about an iPhone app that "can be used by individuals to identify logos that may occur in photographs they take with their phone and to replace them with images drawn from an online databank."

A Kickstarter campaign was organized to support the project, but it fell short of the $4,000 target.
- via

All Your TVs Are Belong To Hollywood

The FCC "approved a request to allow companies that sell movies via video-on-demand services to activate signals that would block the copying or other re-use in home entertainment systems of recent releases." (NYTimes, via @stellawongo)

In other words,
- Content owners will be able to turn off, remotely, certain plugs on your new fancy TV or set-up box to prevent copying of new VOD releases;
- Some cable channels will be viewable only if you have a new fancy TV -- equipment that supports the Selectable Output Control tech.

These guys are pretty upset; BoingBoing isn't happy either.

Screwing with people's hardware is just wrong. Next thing, they will power down my fridge because I cook recipes off the net instead of buying an authorized cook book. 

Let's see who and how soon will be the first to suggest an idea to remotely shut down TVs of people who routinely skip commercials. 

Your Family Pictures, Now With Limited Commercial Interruptions

Here's one genius idea whose time is yet to come: let people stream online pictures from their accounts on sites such as Facebook and Flickr to the digital frames on their desks, walls and nightstands along with news, stocks and weather updates, and an occasional ad.

There's a company called Thinking Screen Media that does exactly that via its FrameChannel service. Get a wifi-enabled frame, plug into the info stream via FrameChannel and select among dozens of sources, and there you have your own Captivate screen you stare at during elevator rides in the office.  Only now it's in your bedroom. Incidentally, Captivate's founder is on the board of this new company.

The company has done tests with IPG and plans to start selling its ad inventory some time this year. It also has just launched an iPad app that turns the device into digital frame.

The idea is genius because as hardware prices drop and people's comfort with the tech grows, everyone will soon have as many screens on surfaces around them as they now have old-fashioned paper photos. All of these screens will be online.

The idea is early because today wireless frame penetration is at 5%.

Some 5.9 million digital frames shipped in 2008 in the US and the market will remain flat until 2013, and IDC expects that by then two thirds of all frames shipped will have a wireless capability.

Funny, there are people who have already figured out how to block ads on this barely emerging medium (lie about your location during sign-up).

Eventually, digital frames will become wallet-sized. They will be monetized as well: every tenth time that you open your wallet you'll see an ad. Then, our windows will be internet-ready as well.

Bantr Replaces Ads with Tweets

Bantr is a Firefox extension that replaces some 300x250 banners with tweets from your friends. The site says the tweets are matched to the context of the page whose ads it's blocking. I didn't really notice, but I am not following thousands of people, so maybe that's why.  It doesn't replace every single unit, just one, and not on all sites, although it does on AdLab.

Wouldn't it be a fun ironic twist if the tweets Bantr displayed were affiliate ad tweets?

Or you can replace banners with art.


- via

What We Know About Ad Skipping

I've posted a lot about ad skipping in the past here on AdLab, and now we've compiled a lot of different ad avoidance stats on Hill Holliday's blog, plus a bunch of old ads that promote products that help people skip ads (irony alert!). Above: an ad for Mazda that was designed for  people who liked to record their shows on VCRs and fast-forwarded through the commercial breaks.

The Cure Against Loud Commercials

SRS Labs, a company whose sound tech lives in many familiar devices, is bringing us something that will kill the volume difference between commercials and regular programming. The tech is called TruVolume and will come packaged in stand-alone gadgets that go between the TV set and the cable box, and as part of third-party devices (it already lives in some Samsung and Vizio TVs). Other companies working in this direction are Audyssey and Dolby.

Radio Advertising Eliminator would mute the ads altogether.

Details in WSJ, DVICE, and Sound & Vision (via).

Certain Words Zap Gmail Ads

Quickly testing the discovery that certain trigger keywords that relate to disasters kill contextual text ads in Gmail (via @ivanovitch):

A simple email to self designed to trigger auto-related ads. Ads didn't disappoint.





Another email, same copy, added "suicide 9/11" in the same font. Ads go away.




The third email, same copy, but "suicide 9/11" is in smaller and lighter font -- me thinking maybe trigger words can be an invisible part of the signature (click on the image for a larger one). Nope, ads come back.

TV Ads Most Helpful

"Over one-third of Americans (37%) say that television ads are most helpful in making their purchase decision while 17% say newspaper ads are most helpful and 14% say the same about Internet search engine ads. Radio ads (3%) and Internet banner ads (1%) are not considered helpful by many people. Over one-quarter of Americans (28%), however, say that none of these types of advertisements are helpful to them in the purchase decision making process."

On the bright side, 9% say they don't ignore ads.

-- Harris Interactive, July 1, 2009 (pdf)

Porn Mode in New Internet Explorer Worries Advertisers

image credit

Washington Post says advertisers are becoming worried about the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 and its "porn mode" for cookieless browsing called InPrivate.  Details from Microsoft:

"While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:

• New cookies are not stored
  
  • All new cookies become “session” cookies
  • Existing cookies can still be read
  • The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
• New history entries will not be recorded
• New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
• Form data is not stored
• Passwords are not stored
• Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
• Queries entered into the search box are not stored
• Visited links will not be stored."

100 Million Hours of Ads a Weekend?

You might have already seen Clay Shirky's now famous speech about cognitive surplus given at Web2Expo and the dramatic comparison of the time spent watching TV (200B hours a year in the US) and building Wikipedia (100M hours total).

He mentioned another number I thought was interesting: "In the US, we spend 100 million hours a weekend watching just the ads" (fast-forward to 5:52, or read the transcript). The order of magnitude seems right but I can't figure out how he arrived at his estimate. Here are the inputs I'm working with.



- Number of hours spent by men watching TV on weekends: 6.98hrs (less for women, but I'm keeping the math simple). I don't know if the number is an average across the entire population or only accounts for those who watch TV.
- Number of ad minutes per hour of TV programming: 16 (wiki), which means 3.72 hours of ads total for a two-day weekend (16*6.98/60*2).

Now, to arrive at the 100M hours number, we need to assume an active audience of 26,881,720 (100M/3.72hrs) viewers on each of the two days. How accurate is this number? I'll try to check with our media folks next week, but drop a comment if you have ideas.

Of course, this little calculation assumes that Shirky's remark was not a mere rhetorical device (hey, if we just stopped watching ads we could build a wikipedia in a weekend) and that people do watch all of the ads throughout the entire 7-hour TV binge instead of doing laundry or zoning out.

Related:
Dissecting Advertising Clutter
The Ad Zapper in Your Brains

Block Twitter Madness Out of Your Life

Let me start by acknowledging that Twitter looks useful. I remain one of those who don't get it (I tried), but there are many other things I don't quite understand and in most cases my ignorance is due to my own limitations.

So, Twitter, it's not you, it's me. A few things have been bugging me about you ever since we met -- readers are not sheep to be called followers -- but really, you are cool. We'll remain polite to each other even if entrenched in our respective worldviews. Who knows, maybe we'll do business together one day.

What I can't explain -- nor calmly bear -- is the nauseating giddiness that's been bubbling in my RSS reader for the past year. Everywhere I clicked, it's been twitter this, twitter that. High-school dramas over who tweeted what to whom. (Speaking of 2.0 dramas, here's a great collection.) It was amusing for a couple of months, after which I hoped the spotlight would turn away. It never did, so I thought I'd do something about it myself. Now, everywhere I browse, the words "twitter" and its derivatives are replaced with what the whole thing really is - "madness". All it took was a Greasemonkey Firefox extension and a slightly tweaked profanity filter.



It's like one moment you have hundreds of canaries in your room, and then suddenly someone turns them all off.

It's quieter, and everything makes a lot more sense, too.




The followers of GapingVoid's author mourned his departure from madness in some 150 comments.

Assorted April Media Hoaxes

This year's ad prank is Trust Banners that gain "consumer trust through high frequency (90fps) banner adverts which stimulate specific regions of the visual cortex (Visual area V5/MT) producing instant effects on consumers."





Turning black and white TVs into color sets by wrapping them in nylon stockings must be the best media-related April 1 hoax ever (Orson Welles's War of the Worlds was on Halloween so it doesn't qualify). Above is the original broadcast on the Swedish TV back from April 1, 1962.





Among the pranks that would actually make sense to implement for real is last year's announcement by XM radio that it is launching a new channel entirely powered by podcasts.


The always adorable Google added a new function to Docs this year that creates a blank document with an outline of a paper airplane.



Also:
Remote Control Jammer Chip Activated By Commercials

Spam Through Google Calendar

A newly discovered way to send spam: as a Google Calendar invitation. My favorite one, though, remains spam sent through the "Send to friend" button at NY Times.com. Very intellectual.

Idea: Remote Control Jammer Chip Activated By Commercials

Imagine this. You send out a bunch of promo stuff: schwag, catalogs, merchandise. Every item is equipped with a small chip. Next, you create a TV commercial and insert an "inaudible 200MHz molecular vibration sound mat". When you run the spot on TV, the inaudible signal activates the chip, which in turn jams the signal from your remote control blocking people from switching channels. When your commercial stops playing, the remote goes back to normal.

Welcome The XV2083 Remote Control Jammer. The video is below.




Too bad it ain't a real product, but a campaign by a communications agency. Very convincing, though. The next version of the chip should also emit signals that block microwave ovens and suppress bathroom urges.

It's not entirely science fiction, though. Here's a video of a working TV remote jammer and instructions for building one, and a diagram:

A World Without Billboards

Above: an ad for Sky movies ("you don't like interruptions so we took out the ads") showing a world without billboards.

Below: a slideshow of Sao Paolo after the mayoral billboard ban.

Firebrand Ratings: How Many People Watch One Hour of TV Commercials

Quick intro: Firebrand is a one-hour 11pm weeknights TV show on ION that has nothing but commercials. The show has a website. The idea is that "viewers will gladly watch commercials" if they are entertaining and non-intrusive.

AdRants did a post on Firebrand a few days ago, saying, "We're pretty sure the only people watching Firebrand this week or any week will be people working in advertising, hardly an audience large enough to support the company's grandiose vision of becoming some sort of popular destination. "

Shari Leventhal, Firebrand's CEO, responded (fourth comment after the post on AdRants): "We've had over 2.5 million viewers watching Firebrand on average each week."

Curious, I checked the numbers:

• Number of people watching Firebrand TV show on ION (11 pm weeknights): 106,000*
• Number of people employed in advertising agencies in the US: 188,100**

Am I doing the math wrong? Is Nielsen off?

Below is the website traffic estimate (uniques) from Compete.com:




* Nielsen's ratings for Jan 1-31 2008 for Firebrand: 0.09 HH (106,000 average nightly viewers), 0.06 AD2554 (75,000 adult viewers 25-54)

** US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Nov 2007 estimate, full chart pulled from this page.

Ad Skipping Strains Power Grid

"The 1990 World Cup tops the list of record-breaking TV "pick-ups" (Source: National Grid, BBC)"

Even though the Superbowl Flush is a myth and our American readers have nothing to fear this coming Sunday, it doesn't mean that the collective ad avoidance doesn't strain urban infrastructure elsewhere. Virtual Economics unearthed a decade-old article from BBC about Brits leaving their TVs during the World Cup half-time to -- what else? -- make some tea:

"This mass synchronised tea-break has in the past caused huge power surges and problems for the National Grid, which operates the high-voltage transmission network in England and Wales.

A crack team of statisticians with their finger on the pulse of the TV sub-culture leaf through listings magazines in an attempt to predict peaks in electricity use."

Dissecting Advertising Clutter, Part II

Last November, I spent some time poking around and trying to figure out where the "an average American is exposed to 5000 ad messages" number had come from (see the original post). President of Yankelovich J. Walker Smith, whom I cited as one of the sources, offered his explanation in a comment to the post on Hill Holliday blog:

"Still, it’s interesting to know how these ad exposure estimates are calculated. The oldest such estimate is the one cited by David Shenk in Data Smog. His figure comes from a figure cited in Alvin Toffler’s 1971 book Future Shock. Toffler’s figure came from a conference speech that cited a number calculated by Bill Moran for use in that speech (delivered by his boss) when he was running the research function at Y&R. I know this because I am a friend of Bill’s and he has related this story to me. Bill made a simple calculation. He simply conducted a thought exercise and went through the typical day for a typical person in a typical American big city in the 1960s. How many times would such a person be exposed to some sort of ad, logo or promotion? He came to around 500. It’s that simple, and that’s where this early figure comes from.

Note what is being calculated here. Not the number of ads people pay attention to, but the number of ads that people might pay attention to. It’s exposure opportunities. Obviously, we live lives nowadays in which ever more of the white space around us is crowded with ads. Thus, we have many more opportunities for ad exposure."

Earlier:
Dissecting Advertising Clutter, Part I
Advertising Clutter in 1759

The Ad Zapper in Your Brains

During commercial breaks,

• 41.2% of viewers channel-surf
• 33.5% talk with others in the room or by phone
• 30.2% mentally tune out
• 5.5% regularly fully attend to commercials

In other news, this winter fewer people eat (68.8%) and more people do laundry (58%) while consuming media (70% and 57.4% in July 2007, respectively). This and other amusing tidbits in the new BIGresearch's research of simultaneous media consumption SIMM 11.

Dissecting Advertising Clutter, Part I

You have probably heard (or even said) at some point in your career that an average American is exposed to 3000-5000 ad messages every day. But do you know where this number comes from? If you do, please leave a comment. If you don't, you are not alone. Not having an idea either but very curious, I spent some time poking around. Take a look at my initial findings.

Update [Jan.28 '08]. President of Yankelovich, J. Walker Smith, sheds more light on the number's genesis in his comment on the Hill Holliday blog.

Ad Zappers For Facebook

Scripts for the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in that zap Facebook's ads: directory, Flyer Remover, Feed Ads Remover, Sponsored News Remover, and, the newest, everything-remover. There are more.



Bonus: a bunch of slides (Tim O'Reilly's is the most interesting) and videos from the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference for Facebook developers. Here's a video about why Facebook is a hell to monetize.

Spam Culture-Sensitive; Other Stats

"[IT security company] Kaspersky found products punted through junk mail differed according to language with most Russian language spam offering education and training, and goods ranging from busts of the Russian president to a device which will 'translate' a dog’s bark. English language spam, by contrast, tends to focus on advertising for stocks and shares, penis pills and cheap (pirated) software."
-- The Register (March 1, 2007)

Some of the other interesting things about spam in the Kaspersky's report:
- Spam: 70% - 80% of all mail traffic
- The newest spammer technologies can send out hundreds of thousands of messages in under an hour.
- Spammers have also mastered psycholinguistic methods of manipulating spam readers. In other words, spammers are still using text, and are successfully disguising spam as personal correspondence.
- Kaspersky also explains subliminal spam: Most probably, animated spam is used to evade OCR technologies which can be used to filter out spam.

Earlier:
Subliminal Spam

Advertising Clutter in 1759

"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic."
-- Samuel Johnson, "The art of advertising exemplified", The Idler (a series of essays published in Universal Chronicle) # 4o, 1759 (wiki, full text).

Earlier:
Automatic Ad Skipping In 1934

Content-Filtering Technology Auto-Swaps Ad

There's a lawsuit (details) that involves a truck stop operator that used segOne technology to filter out generic ads on its TVs and replaced them with hand-picked messages targeted at truckers. Here's a blurb about this interesting tech:

"The segOne 2000 LS connects to any television. It detects when a commercial break occurs, switching channels seamlessly, playing the commercials provided by segOne. The commercials will be specially selected for the establishments in the area where you want to focus your product. The commercials last a predetermined length (30-seconds up to two minutes), then the system returns to the original program, undetected. This innovative technology is compatible with direct satellite, cable television set-ups, and HDTV."

-- via TechDirt

Automatic Ad Skipping In 1934

Modern Mechanix, April 4, 1934 via Modern Mechanix blog: "The device, known as the 'radio advertising eliminator,' will operate the radio only when musical programs are coming over the air. Just as soon as any voice announcement is made from the station, the radio receiver is turned off and is not turned on again until the musical program resumes. It is believed that the new device uses a vibrating reed tuned to a predominant voice frequency to operate a relay which turns the set on and off."

DailyKos Asks Ad Blocking Readers to Subscribe

Wonder what has prompted this note on DailyKos: "We won't stop you from using ad blocking software, but if you do use it we ask you to support Daily Kos another way: by purchasing a site subscription. A subscription is an inexpensive way to support the site that eliminates the advertisements without using ad blocking software."

Are they seeing a lot of people using Adblock or simply reacting to the hoopla?

Related:
Brandweek on Adblock Plus
Why Adblock Plus May Be a Good Thing
Script Detects Adblock Plus
NYTimes on AdBlock Plus

Script Detects Adblock Plus

The guy behind Why Firefox is Blocked (it is now unblocked) has posted a script that allows publishers to detect whether readers' browsers are equipped with the Adblock Plus plug-in and take appropriate actions.

I have been using Adblock Plus for two weeks now and I think it's great. It is so on two levels: adless pages look great, and the software, if widely adopted, will put pressure on ad makers to create better ads. I explain why on the Hill Holliday blog.

I've also been listening to reactions from across the web. Very, very entertaining. Here are some:

Network Performance Daily: "Adblock, and its counterpart, Filterset.G, did not come from a vacuum. They responded to demand and solved a problem."

CNet: "In the end, a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources"

Escape Job Hell: "Well, if you were smart, you’d be using several different techniques to monetize your blog. That way, the ads that people weren’t going to click in the first place are now out of the way. Now the people blocking the adsense ads have less clutter on their screen and they can pay more attention to your other features."

The Register: "As more and more people install AdBlock Plus, which is officially recommended by Mozilla, will Google continue to fund the browser?"

Rough Type: "Microsoft's laissez-faire attitude may seem surprising, but it reflects a cold strategic calculation. Microsoft knows that ad blockers pose a far greater threat to Google than to itself."

The NYTimes article that started it all is on International Herald Tribune that doesn't require the annoying registration.

More quotes have been collected by ComputerWorld.

Earlier:
NYTimes on AdBlock Plus

Study: Banners Work Even When Overlooked

Source: "Banner Blindness, Old and New Findings", Jacob Nielsen, Aug 20, 2007

Jacob Nielsen confirms that people don't see online banners: "At all levels of user engagement, the finding is the same regarding banners (outlined with green boxes in the above illustration): almost no fixations within advertisements."

But that's Ok. ArsTechnica writes, "There is a long history of experiments that show that repeated exposure to a stimulus that's barely perceptible can enhance a person's feelings towards what's otherwise a neutral object." And now there is a new research that concludes that "repeated exposure to a product via banner ads generates a positive feeling towards that product." (Note: the ArsTechnica's article came out in May 2007, three months before Nielsen's).

Conclusion: buy cheap remnant space. Nobody sees the ads anyway, but the subliminal effect is the same.

Related:
Study: Banner Ads Affect Memory
Subliminal Spam

NYTimes on AdBlock Plus

NYTimes has an article on Adblock Plus, an ad blocking plug-in for Firefox: "The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model."

A quote from the plug-in maker: "There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren’t blocked — make sure the users don’t want to block them." he wrote.

I took two screenshots of the article page in NYTimes.com, one before the Adblock was installed, the other one right after, on default settings. The white space that was used by the ads is collapsed in the ad-free version. Click image to zoom in.

One way to trick the program is not to use third-party ad networks whose addresses are blocked. I ran Adlab through the plug-in: the AdSense is predictably gone, the hardcoded Amazon books are still there.

Engadget's Ryan Block Against Popover Ads

Engadget's editor Ryan Block writes an open letter asking fellow bloggers to stop using IntelliTXT popover ads: "With all due respect to you, friends, fucking stop it. Seriously, stop supporting these shysters that advertise by generating fake links and popovers on your content."

Friday Special: Blogger Against Ad Blocking

In this blog's spirit of bridging the gap between geekdom and advertising, witness the plight of a guy who decided he'd had enough of Firefox ad-blocking add-on users ripping ads off his blog and blocked access for anyone using the browser.

The blog in question is jacklewis.com/blog. If you are using Firefox, you won't see any of the site and will instead be redirected to Why FireFox is Blocked. Here's the story on InfoWorld. Here are some 1000 comments on Digg.

Besides being a source of morbid fascination, the story is interesting because it's not about a lonely citizen's fight again an evil large ad-spawning corporate monster, for a change. A citizen fighting for advertising -- that's the essence of the 2.0 world with its democratization of publishing tools and the long tail.

One inevitable question: does Mr. Lewis really sit through all the commercials when he watches TV?

Zapping New YouTube Ads

That didn't take long at all. A couple of days ago, YouTube announced the roll-out of InVideo ads laid over the videos inside the player (I posted about the tests earlier). Today, the top story on Digg is about the TubeStop Firefox extension that strips the ads off. And despite YouTube claiming the new ad format is user-friendly, the users aren't welcoming at all.

Earlier:
YouTube Tests Embedded Ads
Adbrite Launches Customizable Video Player
Idea: How to Put Ads into YouTube
Follow-up: Embedding Ads into YouTube Players

Banner Ads You Can Vote On

Adpinion is a new online ad network with a twist: it lets users give each ad a thumb up or a thumb down and serves the subsequent banners according to these user preferences it remembers. Two ideas: would be cool to have the ads bookmarkable and embeddable.

Readers at Techcrunch where the story broke are skeptical and wonder why people would bother to rate an ad. I think it's a good idea. If people are stuck with viewing ads (not everyone using a comprehensive ad blocker), they can just as well turn them into useful information.

Skip Ads With Hand Wave

"Scientists [Dr Prashan Premaratne and Quang Nguyen] have come up with a box that lets television viewers change channels, switch on the DVD player or switch off an irritating presenter with the wave of a hand. The controller's built-in camera can recognise seven simple hand gestures and work with up to eight different gadgets around the home."
-- Daily Mail

Vacation, Adless Browsing

A quick note to apologise for the lack of posts in the past few weeks. I'm on vacation back home doing all sorts of fun stuff offline, and the dial-up connection I've got here is too much of a pain. We'll be back to our regular schedule on July 15th.

In the meanwhile, I've got a note (thank you, Keith) about another way to replace online ads with something else. Last time it was art, this time it's whatever you want it to be, but you'll need to download a ProWebSurfer toolbar.

Firefox Extension Replaces Ads with Art

If you enjoyed AdWordless Google yesterday, here's more ad-avoidance goodness: AddArt, a Firefox extension prototype, replaces banner ads with art. A write-up in NY Times; via Stay Free! The NY Times piece also mentions this piece of trivia from Forrester: "53 percent of consumers had ad-blocking software on their computers in 2006, up from just 21 percent in 2004." That probably includes all the pop-up blockers that come bundled with browsers these days, though, but I'll post more if I find out something. The Forrester research is this one, if your organization has a subscription, and here's more info in Information Week.

Search Google Without Ads

Here, make your own dent in GOOG's stock price -- Google search without AdSense AdWords.
-- via techeblog

Automatic Commercial Skipping

image: comskip

The good news: "On average, Nielsen found, DVR owners watch 40 percent of commercials that they could skip over." (IHT)

Onto the bad news. You are probably familiar with technologies that zap pop-ups and even strip banners off websites you are visiting (here's an earlier piece on GreaseMonkey, and see more links at the end). Now imagine a pop-up blocker for TV. If you think that the 30-sec skip button is evil, how about a completely automated way to skip commercials?

Theory:
Here's a 2004 paper on "Automatic Detection of TV commercials" (pdf, researcher's page): "There are two main categories of methods used to detect commercials. Feature-based detection relies on general characteristics of commercials to detect their presence [things like black frames, silences, variations in sound, absence of broadcaster's logo, etc). Any of the commercial characteristics mentioned earlier could be used to indicate the (possible) presence of a commercial. Recognition-based detection attempts to identify individual commercials in the broadcast as matching commercials it has already learned."

Practice:
"Comskip is a free mpeg commercial detector. It is a windows console application that reads a mpeg file and analyses the content based on a large amount of configurable parameters. After analysis it generates a file in various possible formats containing the location of the commercials inside the mpeg file." Check out the manual to see how it works.

"For those of you unaware, ever since XP Media Center 2005, there has been this fantastic application called "DVRMS Toolbox," which had a bunch of tools to analyze DVRMS files recorded by Media Center and cut/edit/compress/etc. The only feature I use but found difficult to live without is the Commercial Skip Feature. This does exactly what it suggests, it analyzes your Recorded TV shows, and automatically will skip the commercials while you're watching." (Missing Remote; another review.)

"Simply put, ShowAnalyzer is the most advanced commercial detection program available to the public... plus a little extra."

Already, there are TVs that are shipped with a DVR built in as a standard feature (like this LG plasma). How hard is it to imagine TV sets that come with a commercial filter inside, much like today's web browsers packed with pop-up zappers?


Earlier:
How Geeks Block Ads
Set-top Box Blocks Ads
Commentary: Philips's Ad-Skipping Blocker Good Idea
NY Times on Anti-Ad-Skipping Patent by Philips
Firefox Users Click Less, Kill Ads

Data: Good News -- Some People Do Watch Ads

Ball State Uni's Center for Media Design just announced a new installment of results from their media consumption study. This part deals with TV ad avoidance. Some snippets:

" - About one third (32.7%) of all ad pods were watched in their entirety.

- Over one half of all ad pods (57.9%) were interrupted by advertising-related scene shifting or attention shifts.

- Nearly half of the ad breaks were watched for one minute or less, as 15.4 percent of commercial blocks were viewed for 31 to 60 seconds before interruption; 12.1 percent lasted 16 to 30 seconds; 11.8 percent were between 6-10 seconds; and 9.1 percent lasted 5 seconds or less."
-- via lost remote

NY Times on Anti-Ad-Skipping Patent by Philips

NY Times on Sunday weighed in on the controversy Philips created by patenting a remote control that would block ad skipping and channel surfing. The most interesting part comes in the end, when the article discusses the historical precedents and the Supreme Court 5-4 decision that allowed private non-commercial recording of TV programming as "fair use":

"That decision addressed copying with a Betamax videocassette recorder, and it remains the key decision that protects copying with DVR's today. The courts uphold "fair use" only when it doesn't harm the commercial value of the copyrighted work. At the time the suit was brought, skipping ads during playback on a clunky tape machine was hardly worth the considerable trouble. At the trial, survey data showed that only about 25 percent of recorded ads were skipped."

Earlier:
Commentary: Philips's Ad-Skipping Blocker Good Idea

Jupiter: Ad Skipping Could Cost $8 Billion This Year

"Ad-skipping via DVRs could cost networks $8 billion in revenue this year, according to a new report by JupiterResearch. The research found that 53 percent of DVR users skip commercials--a figure below what others have estimated--but nonetheless, if that group skips ads 100 percent of the time, $8 billion of the estimated $74 billion television ad market in 2006 could be lost."
-- Media Post

Earlier:
Ad Skipping To Hit $27 Billion in Lost Revenue

Commentary: Philips's Ad-Skipping Blocker Good Idea

image: A Clockwork Orange, 1971

At Clickz Experts, Dave Evans writes that the ad-zapping stopper patented by Philips is actually a good thing: "TV programmers ought to be able to force viewers to watch commercials. And as the patent makes clear, consumers ought to be able to pay for the option to watch without commercial interruption." His argument is that TV should adopt the web model - you can either pay for ad-free content or watch the content for free but with ads.

Ain't gonna work for many reasons, one of them being the fact that TV and web have different interaction models. Blocking ad-skipping and channel switching on TV would be like freezing someone's browser, disabling the back button and showering the window with pop-ups. Besides, making people watch your ads is like nagging that cute girl to go out with you; she might give in but what's the point? Give them a reason to want it and you will live happily ever after.

Philips Patents Device That Blocks Ad Zapping

It looks like Philips was just awarded a patent for a device that would prevent "a viewer from switching from a channel when an advertisement is being displayed on the channel. A viewer may either watch the advertisements or pay a fee in order to be able to change channels or fast forward when the advertisements are being displayed." Check out the part that outlines background of the invention:

"This is undesirable for program broadcasters because the advertisements that are broadcast with the programs pay for the programs. The program broadcasters therefore have an interest in seeing that the advertisements are viewed and not ignored. There is therefore a need in the art for a video display system that is capable of preventing a viewer of a direct (non-recorded) broadcast from switching from a first channel to a second channel when an advertisement is displayed on the first channel. There is also a need in the art for a video display system that is capable of preventing a viewer of a recorded program from fast forwarding the recorded program in order to skip past advertisements that were recorded with the program."

Pure gold. They also have to patent microwave and bathroom blocking.

-- via New Scientist

Study: Ad Skipping Is DVR Users' Favorite Feature

Adweek: "New research on digital video recorders by WPP Group's Mindshare found that consumers buy the devices mainly to "time shift" (record programs for later viewing) and skip commercials. Among those who already own a DVR, about 90 percent cited time-shifting capability and nearly 80 percent mentioned the ability to skip commercials as their favorite features.

The study, which quizzed 1,200 consumers about their media consumption, also found that the DVR is the top media gadget consumers plan to acquire over the next six months."

The article says the study contradicts an earlier assertion by the networks that "their internal research found that consumers' top reason for purchasing a DVR was the ability to time shift, while commercial skipping was far down on the priority list."

Here's the original story on the networks' joint press conference as reported by the Associated Press. It mentions nothing about this assertion.

Microsoft To Patent Charging for Ad Skip

"Microsoft has applied for a patent for control-based content pricing, which describes a scenario in which viewers are charged higher fees if they skip commercials or replay sports highlights."
-- TechDirt via AdJab

Microsoft's patent application:
"In an implementation of control-based content pricing, a content server distributes media content to a client device in response to a request from the client device to receive the media content. A valuation application allocates a cost to the client device when the media content is distributed to the client device. The content server receives a view control input from the client device that indicates how the media content is to be rendered and the valuation application adjusts the cost according to the view control input and how the media content is to be rendered."

Friday Special: The Dream of Ad Skipping

"The Toshiba V-5310 Betaformat video cassette recorder has a charming new feature: a remote pause control. It lets you edit out commercials when you tape the show you're watching. Without leaving your armchair.

Get the Toshiba V-5310. You'll have a lot of fun with it. And you'' be able to get rid of Mr.Whipple, ring around the collar and the pain caused by aspirin commercials."

This is an ad from a special "Home Video" advertising section that ran in October 30, 1978 in Time magazine. You can read the issue in Time Archives. Normally, a subscription is required, but this particular issue is a free sample (click on "see a sample digital magazine").

The Age of Egocasting

"...The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute.

Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences."
-- Christine Rosen, "The Age of Egocasting", The New Atlantis

Idea on DVR Advertising

"When is the one time we all stare real hard at the TV and give 100pct of our attention? When we are fast forwarding using our TiVo/PVR units. TV never has a greater share of our attention because we all want to stop the fast forward right when the show starts back up. It would be real easy to write software to pull one of the 30 frames per second that are marked for the device, and hold that as a billboard ad for the product being sold until the commercial is over. The viewer won’t see it if they don’t fast forward, and if they do, they see the equivalent of a billboard for the product being sold. Viewers staring hard at your ad. That can’t be a bad thing."
--Mark Cuban

The Forehead Ad Blocker

Now on eBay:
"Tired of seeing advertising everywhere you go? From billboards to commercials, advertising has invaded our precious time with no end in sight. However, mankind has always had the option of ignoring these ads. Don't like a commercial? Change the channel! Don't like a print ad? Flip the page!

But there is a new type of advertising that is rapidly gaining ground: forehead advertising. These ads will be inescapable, especially if you have to visually interact with that soulless human posing as a walking billboard. That is, unless you have the Forehead Ad Blocker!"

Related post:
Human Bodies As Billboards