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.

  • utopiah@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 months ago

    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.