[mythtv-users] commercial flagging idea - commercial"fingerprinting"

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 02:24:09PM -0500, Matt wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2005 1:43 PM, Risto Treksler <risto at elkhornbanff.ca> wrote:
> > I guess I tend to agree that the traditional 80/20 rule does not apply to
> > electronic mediums such as PVRs.
> > 
> > In other words, I don't think that you can satisfy 80% of people by
> > fingerprinting just 20% of the most popular shows, as conventional wisdom
> > would have you think.
> > 
> > Instead of a dozen shows, each with a million viewers
> > think of a million shows, each with a dozen viewers
> > 
> 
> 
> Could be?  But I don't think the networks think that way.  That's why
> they have "prime-time hours".  That's also why they have "sweeps".

There might be a million shows, and a million viewers, but how many
_commercials_ are there?   Far fewer.  And you don't have to be able
to identify them all, because if you get something that looks like:


 longer than 30 seconds  <gap> 30 seconds unidentified <gap> known commercial
    <gap> 30 sec unidentified <gap> known commercial <gap> 3 minutes


Well, you don't need to know what the unidentifieds are to know they
are commercials (and after that you can remember them.)

So I don't watch with captions on -- what percentage of commercials
have captions now?

Also, do these new inaudible sounds that Arbitron is putting into all
programming for their meter appear different in commercials than in
regular shows?