[mythtv-users] [OT] Study proves skipping commercials make TV?less enjoyable

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Wed Jan 28 23:02:53 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 04:49:21PM +0000, Mark Fraser wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 January 2009 01:40:21 Brad Templeton wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 01:54:58PM -0600, Robert Johnston wrote:
> > > 2009/1/14 Brad DerManouelian <myth at dermanouelian.com>:
> > > I believe the main reason for this is the US Producer's seemingly
> > > incessant need to spend 3/4 of the show repeating themselves. Let's
> > > take (For example) Mythbusters as an example (Though this could
> > > equally apply to almost any show).
> > >
> > > The show runs:
> > >
> > > Intro (2 minutes), Titles (3 minutes),
> > > Commercial (5 minutes),
> > > Recap intro (3 minutes), Content (8 minutes), "Coming up" (3 minutes),
> > > Commercial (5 minutes),
> > > Recap intro and previous content (3 minutes), new content (8 minutes),
> > > "Coming up" (3 minutes),
> > > Commercial (5 minutes),
> > > Recap intro and all previous content (5 minutes), new content (5
> > > minutes), "Coming up" (4 minutes),
> > > Commercial (5 minutes),
> > > Recap (again) (5 minutes), finale (4 minutes), Wrap up and end credits
> > > (3 minutes).
> 
> That's almost exactly how The Gadget Show is on five, except that they also 
> squeeze in a 'competition' to win £10,000s of prizes and all you have to do 
> is select the correct answer of 3 possibles.
> 
> Probably only has about 30mins of actual content.


One of my distant wishlist items for Myth is the idea of a simple
scripting language where fans of shows can "train" Myth in various
ways about a show.     This doesn't require that most users know
how to use the scripting language, but that some obsessive fan
releases a script.

The most common thing to train would be commercial elimination
and other "parsing" of the show.   For example, I would love to
train it about "The Daily Show."   The Daily Show always has a
particular commercial pattern, where there is just 1-2 minutes
of material at the end of the show, with a commercial break
after the interview.   This is a hard pattern for the automatic
commercial eliminator to identify as it is atypical.

Trainers could learn to even identify fingerprints of opening
montages and start breaking a show up into scenes, letting the
program present a DVD chapters style menu or quickly skip to
important points.  In some cases there might be material in
the closed caption that can be used to detect things, though not
all cards provide those.

Oh well, just a SMOP.


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