Commercial skipping

Commercial skipping is an advanced feature in some digital video recorders that makes it possible to automatically skip commercials in recorded programs. This feature had created controversy, with major television networks and movie studios claiming it violates copyright and should be banned.

History

For many years, video recorders manufactured for the Japanese market have been able to skip advertisements automatically, which is done by detecting when foreign language audio overdub tracks provided for many programmes go silent, as advertisements were broadcast with a single language only.

The first  DVR which had a built-in Commercial skipping feature was ReplayTV with its "4000 Series" and "5000 Series" units. In 2002 five owners of the ReplayTV DVR sued the main television networks and movie studios, asking the federal judge to uphold consumers' rights to record TV shows and skip commercials claiming that features like commercial skipping help parents protect their kids from excessive consumerism. ReplayTV ended up filing for bankruptcy in 2003 after fighting a copyright infringement suit over the ReplayTV's ability to skip commercials.

Commercial skipping software

In addition to the PVR devices which existed in the private market since the late 1990s, towards the mid-2000s, due to the significant advances in home computers, Home theater PCs started gaining popularity in the private market and many users began using their Home theater PCs in their living room for entertainment purposes.

Following this, many PVR programs were developed, including popular programs such as Windows Media Center, which contained all of the features of the PVR devices in addition to advanced features such as HDTV and the use of Multiple TV Tuner Cards. However, evidently many users who used their PVR software to archive their programs found out that the recorded files took up large amount of hard disk space. Due to this some independent developers began developing independent third-party software capable of skipping the commercial segments from recorded videos as well as permanently removing the commercial segments from the recorded video files.

As of today, many popular PVR programs, such as Windows Media Center, SageTV and MythTV have the ability to skip commercials segments after installing third-party add-ons, such as DVRMSToolbox, Comskip and ShowAnalyzer which use various advanced techniques to locate the commercial segments in the video files and save their locations to text files. With help of that information many users have the ability to skip the commercials within recorded TV broadcasts. In addition to that, these text files can also be fed into programs such as MEncoder or DVRMSToolboxGUI which are capable of permanently removing the commercial segments from the recorded video files and thus help reduce the recorded videos file size without losing the video quality.

One of the major weaknesses of those third-party programs is that because most of them operate automatically, occasionally they would mistakenly remove parts of the show in addition to the commercials segments. Also, most of those third-party programs do not allow manual fine-tuning of the commercial segments locations by the users before the actual removal is done.

The future of TV advertisements

The introduction of digital video recorders, such as TiVo, and services like Sky+, which allow the recording of television programs onto a hard drive, also enable viewers to fast-forward through advertisements or automatically skip commercials of recorded programs. Many speculate that television advertisements will be eliminated altogether, replaced by advertising in the TV shows themselves. For example, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition advertises Sears, Kenmore, Kohler, and Home Depot by specifically using products from these companies.

Another type of advertisement shown more and more, mostly for advertising TV shows on the same channel, is where the ad overlays the bottom of the TV screen, blocking out some of the picture. "Banners", or "Logo Bugs", as they are called, are referred to by media companies as Secondary Events (2E). This is done in much the same way as severe weather warnings are done. Sometimes these take up only 5-10% of the screen, but in the extreme, can take up as much as 25% of the viewing area. Some even make noise or move across the screen. One example of this is the 2E ads for Three Moons Over Milford in the months before its premiere. A video taking up approximately 25% of the bottom-left portion of the screen would show the main character, Jens Poulsen Schmidt, riding a comet impacting into the moon with an accompanying explosion, during another television program.

See also

• Ad blocking

References

External links

• DVR commercial skipping: 50% or 70%? Depends on whom you ask
• Commercial skipping to cost $8 billion in TV ads this year?
• Automatic Commercial Skip in Media Center
• Commercial-skipping 'thieves' sue accusers - Fans of Sonicblue gear strike back at entertainment giants
• Television Remixed: The Controversy over Commercial-Skipping
• Comskip—a command-line tool to locate commercials in MPEG files