We mostly watch news and sports in my house. So unfortunately, live TV. Occasionally we watch other things. I mute the commercials and browse my phone when they’re on.
But I would love a TV that is smart enough to auto hide & mute every kind of ad. Even little logos on the athletes’ uniforms. Hide the ads on the pitcher’s mound. Hide the billboards and signs in the stadium. Show some cool little generic animation, music video, or slide show during commercial breaks. Hide the damned popup window ads and scrolling ads that some channels do. Remove product placements from movies and shows. Basically make all ads completely vanish.
Interestingly, in the novel Contact by Carl Sagan a rich character got his money by selling a device that did more or less that.
Either support FOSS or the ai won’t be yours when it does it. And you are back where you are started.
Denying profit to shady data merchants is the key to reclaiming digital sovereignty. It is done but cutting their access to your data.
That would be glorious.
But you’d definitely have to jailbreak your device and sideload it somehow.
Or pay to import one from a country where the govt doesn’t give a damn about piracy if it ever gets made.
Ad blocking is not piracy. It is not copyright infringement. It is not illegal. Given the right circumstances it could come to be, but it’d be a fine line to walk.
Agreed 100%.
But no business in the capitalist world where selling ads is a billion dollar industry is going to make this available. In fact they’ll fight it tooth and nail. All the way to the SCOTUS if they have to.
You’ll never be able to buy that at like a Walmart of Best Buy type retailer. TVs these days are already just spy machines to serve ads. It’s a lovely idea, but it’ll never happen.
You aren’t allowed the use AI that’s anti-capitalist in America
I use npvr with comskip.exe and it does a fairly reasonable job of taking the ads out of free to air TV.
You can see in the timeline where it’s detected ads, but you can use the mouse or arrow keys to still play those areas if it got it wrong.
I just watch shows on a few apps with no ads. Britbox and Acorn are my go tos. They are premium but total about $15/mo. Also PBS app but there are a couple of ads as shows begin.
LibreELEC on a network with at least one Adguard home instance!!
I mean for advert breaks, there are projects to do this to recorded tv automatically (with varying degrees of success depending on the config and the channel).
That is, you record the TV from either a TV receiver card, or streamed live channels to disk, then run this process on the mkv/mp4/ts, and it will either create a set of chapters marking the ads (so you can skip them), or it will just remove them entirely.
I don’t think it would transfer to “live” TV quite so readily though. Because it does scan the whole program to find things like logos etc to help work out where the adverts are. But, I mean a lot of the work has been done.
For removing all product logos. I mean, I bet we’re not far from the processing power to make it possible. But, probably a fair bit of effort needed.
I can imagine the “AI” chips being neutered for these kind of tasks, like the “low hash rate” Nividia cards.
I agree but I don’t watch TV so I don’t bother. Yet… I still hate product placement so I might be interested in such a solution. Anyway here is how I would do it :
- evaluate what exists, e.g SponsorBlock, and see what’s the closest that fit my need, try it, ask in forum or repository issues if modifications are possible
- gather videos of the typically problematic content, say few hours to start
- annotate them by adding the time stamps then the location on the image
- replace problematic content with gradually complex solutions, e.g black, average color of the area, denoising (quite compute intensive)
- honestly evaluate the result
- consider the biggest problem, e.g here on first pass fixed content so a detector based on machine learning for the type of content could help
- iterate, sharing my result back with the closest interested community
Honestly it’s a worthwhile endeavor but be mindful it’s an arm race. There are a LOT of smart people paid to add ads everywhere… but there are even more people, like you and I, eager to remove them. IMHO the key trick is, like SponsorBlock, to federate the efforts.
Not for most duff you mentioned, but the adbreaks themselves:
Our old dvr enabled us to skip ads in the recorded tv programs pretty accuratley. It set chapter markings whenever an ad-block began/ended which it figured out by the frequency of hard cuts as ads have them between every ad (so multiple times a minute) whlie normal programming usually does not. This was way pre-AI (like late 00s). Sadly the built in dvrs in our tvs after that did not have that function, but maybe there is a modern implimentation somewhere.
Unfortunately this does not financially benefit the tv manufacturers, and may land them in trouble with the platforms they themselves advertise on (like Google).
They’re more likely to use AI to serve you more ads as an extra revenue stream; capitalism has gotta capital.
Sounds like a viable market gap for a new manufacturer!
You could always just buy any TV with an an analog tuner and watch whatever’s on the air these days.
I just want a good quality TV without a smart os built in.
Same! So hard to find and much more expensive when you do.
I recently read Contact(the book by Carl Sagan, still need to watch the movie), which features a tech billionaire who built his wealth doing exactly that. He developed a chip that could block TV commercials, and later one to filter televangelists as well.
For a book that was published in the 80s and set in the late 90s, it’s prescient in a few very specific ways. We weren’t exactly communicating by Portable Telefax in 1999, but adblockers were not far away either.
He also wrote (in the non-fiction 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World), “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
How would you describe SMS to people in the 80s?
“See how you can call people with your telephone? It’s like that, but you can send text messages instead. All telephones have a little screen to display the message.”
I don’t think people from the 80s would have much trouble understanding sms, tbh.
Or, and hear me out, you could say “portable fax” and be done with it. YOU are making it complicated by not being culturally acclimated to the timeframe when it was written. Everyone knew what faxes were, no explanation was necessary.
Portable fax: thing that sends and receives messages
Portable Fax IS how you describe SMS in the 80s.
I dont mean that your understanding is unimportant, but that you inherently understand what’s being described to a degree that to hear it described differently than you expect you reject what you hear in favor of assuming the folks in the 80s needed more than “portable fax” to understand what you are on about.
Pagers were in somewhat common use in the 60s, by 1980 wide area paging was on the market offering the ability to send text messages to portable devices anywhere in the country - I’d describe sms as two way pagers.
