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.
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Or better—an AI that blocks ads and then gives you buying recommendations based on products from their competitors.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
TVs are cheap right now like really cheap. I seriously doubt they’re selling them much above cost and making the money back on the advertising and information gathering.
I don’t think any of the TV manufacturers would bulk too much at selling you a TV but it’s going to be at a price of around the lifetime value of your watching habits. You can get a 50-60" reference monitor for about 10 grand. If there was a market for it Best buy would probably sell it.
You aren’t allowed the use AI that’s anti-capitalist in America
LibreELEC on a network with at least one Adguard home instance!!
A pet pieve of mine is people randomly sticking the term “AI” into description of some tech.
You want ad blocking. (Which is based.) But you don’t want “AI”. If this can be done in a way that doesn’t qualify as “AI”, that would satisfy you, yes?
And using the term “AI” that way makes it clear you haven’t really thought through what you really even want in that feature. (Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, especially in a showerthoughts community, but it’s still kindof a “slaps me in the face” kind of thing.)
And the term “AI” is so imprecise anyway.
And particular kinds of “AI” are such a bubble right now. And that’s why everybody is sticking the word “AI” into random contexts for no fucking reason. But it’s also just gimmick at best and a huge scam at worst.
And “AI” is inevitably bad about false positives and such.
I’d really rather see the word “magic” than “AI” in this context. Because at least that admits that this is an idle wish and not something you think actual real-world adult humans should be seeking venture capital to do.
I’m sorry for taking this out on you specifically. You’re definitely not the first person I’ve seen do this.
They have absolutely thought through what they want in terms of features and the features they described absolutely require machine learning as it stands today. I cannot think of any other methods to remove advertisements from objects in a live video feed like the pitcher mound example op provides.
I cannot think of any other methods
Exactly. What you’re describing isn’t “AI.” It’s “magic.” And “AI” can’t do what OP wants either.
No “AI” solution we have any reason to expect we’ll be able to create in anything approaching the foreseeable future is going to be able to do anything remotely like this without ridiculous amounts of false positives and/or false negatives.
By false positives in this case, I mean things like not coming back from the cool little slideshows until a minute past the end of the commercial break or obscuring important details of the show having falsely “concluded” that it’s a logo or some such.
And I would have assumed “without a lot of false positives” would have gone without saying. If OP is comfortable with lots of non-ad content blocked/obscured along with the ads, then I’ve got a 100% guaranteed zero-false-negatives solution that’ll fit OP’s requirements without involving a speck of “AI” anywhere that OP can implement right now: turn the TV off.
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 run my tv through my pihole. It doesn’t take out everything, but it’s a good start.
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.
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 :’(
“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!”
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.
You could always just buy any TV with an an analog tuner and watch whatever’s on the air these days.
Meanwhile tv manufacturers are working on AI to sneak in more advertising.
