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.
I run my tv through my pihole. It doesn’t take out everything, but it’s a good start.
This is why i pirate. Haven’t seen a tv ad in months (not counting product placement in shows/movies obviously).
It does help a bit, but most stuff I watch on my TV with ads (Hulu, YouTube, and YouTube TV) don’t work unless the ads are unblocked as well :’(
Any issues with content not coming through like it should when using that? My household uses youtube apps on roku, and i have a feeling i would just mess that up if i employ a pihole since youtube serves ads on the same servers as content.
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.
Sorry, but the only AI TV you’ll get has the job of analyzing your habits and selecting additional ads especially for you while completely trampling on your right or privacy.
LibreELEC on a network with at least one Adguard home instance!!
“We’re sorry, using AI-based ad-blockers is a violation of our Terms of Service Agreement. Per the agreement terms, your account is now suspended and you’ve been charged an additional early termination fee, because fuck you.”
While I’m sure there will eventually be some grass-roots attempts, the providers will fight it to the death. A person can dream, though.
Then they’ll get sued by some rando, and the company won’t immediately ban other users but instead use their own version of AI generated ads that will figure out a way to increase all the ads, bypassing the blockers, and then they increase their subscription prices because the “pirates made us do it!”
You cleanly have gotten this all wrong. The AI is suppose to make money not reduce income. Get out of here with this “make all ads completely vanish”
People with this mentality are so odd to me, like you must be very young or actively avoided witnessing any of the endless stream of disruptor technologies which have come and ended once untouchable business by making them obsolete.
That or you’ve conveniently forgotten all the times you said something like ‘streaming will never replace video rental’ or ‘they’ll never let VoIP displace long distance call charges’ then reality has proven you wrong.
I call the other side of the world almost every day for several hours and it costs me absolutely nothing, when I was a kid we had to time how long a call to the other side of town lasted because it was so expensive.
Tech regularly makes things significantly cheaper, and not just on the scale of things like lace costing so much that lace curtains were a sign of high affluence before the industrial revolution. Have you ever had a encyclopedia salesman knock at your door? No? It was common before Wikipedia and the internet absolutely destroyed that business model and gave everyone access to information for free.
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.
Meanwhile tv manufacturers are working on AI to sneak in more advertising.
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.
no business in the capitalist world where selling ads is a billion dollar industry is going to make this available
How about an open-hardware open-source project on e.g CrowdSupply (something like https://www.crowdsupply.com/jie-zou/rggber but dedicated) where everything is setup to do so efficiently, e.g an HDMI/HDMI box where you put the signal in, get the signal out, and on its own does nothing but cool looking visual filters, e.g from color to black&white, yet when the user reconfigure it, with community made filter, it removes ads?
Or perhaps an AI that blocks ads and then gives you buying recommendations based on products from their competitors.
Ah yes, I’ve been waiting for an ad block that replaces an ad with 2 more ads
Buying recommendations as in a list of products provided on request, rather than intrusive narratives that disrupt what you’re trying to watch.
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.”
That was goddamn prophetic
Would you consider EFax to be portable Telefax (I assume that’s what Telefax was) or even email?
I haven’t read it, so I may be misinterpreting the terms.
It’s not a device that Sagan goes into much detail about, aside from it being a new and less-than-reliable technology in the early parts of the story. I always imagined it as a laptop-sized, wireless fax machine using cellular networks to share data. Characters mostly use paper documents throughout the book, and while there are some sci-fi technologies like holographic displays that advance throughout the story, Sagan never describes anything like portable computers or smartphones. Even the internet(or its closest approximation) never goes beyond a rudimentary data-sharing network for astronomers, never open to the public.
A quick google search tells me EFax would probably work over that network, sending documents from a desktop straight to someone’s Portable Telefax like an email, so you’re not far off.
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.
Best chance it happening is by a open source app that you run on a shieldtv or HTPC and run your video through for filtering. Everything will probably be on a long delay so the video can be scrubbed. But this should be doable soonish.
It wouldn’t be a TV itself, it would be an extra box you feed the TV signal into for filtering, then out to the TV itself.
This has been done previously for language filtering with hilarious results. It was called “TVGuardian”, oh, almost 30 years ago now.
It translated “the Dick Van Dyke Show” to “Jerk Van Gay”.
I’m friends with a family who had one of those until maybe about 10 years ago when it stopped working.
“Asshole” became “idiot”.
IIRC “fuck” was skipped over entirely.
Some movies were unwatchable.
To be fair, Dick Van Dyke is ALREADY a hilarious name. Not even sure how that made it past 1950s censors who wouldn’t let Ricky and Lucy sleep in the same bed, or Barbra Eden show her belly button.
Because it’s his actual legal name. It’s not some snarky name they created for the show.
Tell that to Johnny Felatio.
TiVo used to have a commercial filter. The networks sued them. I don’t remember who won. This was a lifetime ago for most Lemmy users.
Here is a video (24:27) by Technology Connections talking about the TV Guardian. There’s also this video (20:59) by Ben Eater, who looks at the memory chip on the device to figure out how it works. It’s pretty neat, and I recommend both videos if you have some spare time.
The idea that AI would be used to prevent companies from making money seems a bit far fetched to me.
AI doesn’t require a company. There are already AI created by independent groups
In it’s current iteration, either you run a local model which has limitations that I think would prevent it from being used to this end (I don’t know that for sure, and am happy to find out if anyone does know), or you use a corporate one. Unfortunately corps seem largely to want to use AI to make money and one of the best ways to make money in the age of information is ads. There’s a reason they have become more and more prevalent despite the fact that so many people hate them.
