Google's New Patent on Commercial Breaks

theodp writes "What could be more annoying than having ads precede online videos? How about having commercials interrupt the videos? That's the premise behind a newly-published Google patent application for Using Viewing Signals in Targeted Video Advertising."

Sounds like an abuse cool technology

[ccguy]

The interesting part of the patent is not that they interrupt the video to show a commercial (surely there is prior art on that), but rather than the commercial breaks are determined automatically by analyzing the video and audio (detecting scene changes for example).

Also, they gather 'interaction data' with the first commercial, and use it for the following ones.

There's a bidding system to buy advertisement slots on specific video, so if there's a very hot video in say, youtube, you can put your commercial there almost inmediately... seems like the best way to maximize advertising costs.

I hope they are patenting this to..

[the_rajah]

just sit on the patent to keep anyone from doing it. They do promise to do no evil, right?

Google patents annoying users

[edwardpickman]

Google hearby patents all forms of advertising that annoys the piss out of users. All forms of pop ups and redirected ads will also fall under the user annoyance patent.

Another badly issued patent

[Whuffo]

Prior art on this goes back a long way. I helped develop studio end hardware for the "UPI Newstime" system back in the mid '70s - the commercial breaks in cable programming were marked by a touch-tone sequence and the local broadcaster inserted advertising at that point automatically.

That technology is still in use; ever hear a burst of fast touch-tone at a program break? That's this system at work. Other than that "using a computer" BS, what they're claiming is exactly what we were doing 30 years ago.

For what it's worth, reliably detecting and decoding those touch-tone burst sequences using the technology available then was more than a little challenging. The Signetics 567 was brand new and looked so promising - but turned out to be a time sink. Never could get those little PLL chips to lock up fast enough and reliably enough. The real solution was a big mess of discrete analog stuff; those were the days...

boingboing tv does this

[quiddity]

See http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/03/12/goobees-animated-can.html [boingboing.net] which gets interrupted halfway through, completely ruining a short animation. idiots. what a hateful way to treat content.

Re:Sounds like an abuse cool technology

[Ethanol-fueled]

That could backfire. If the ad weren't flagged as an ad, then we'd have to watch ads while watching an ad! Commercial breaks during a commercial! Shhhh....don't give them any ideas!
 
  Captcha: horrible

Re:Sounds like an abuse cool technology

[Anonymous Coward]

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%22Movie+advertising+placement%22&OS=%22Movie+advertising+placement%22&RS=%22Movie+advertising+placement%22 [uspto.gov] prior art?

Oh please, enough with the ads!

[mrboyd]

Enough with ads, they have the whole page to display ad, and an insert at the beginning "sponsored by..." should be enough without them having trying to rape the content.

I come from a country where TV station are limited by law to one ad break per movie/tv show and where they don't pollute the screen with overlays of next weeks programming. Tv stations still make plenty of money don't worry. The difference is that our talk show host don't need to tell you they'll be right back every 8 minutes. It might be that they don't earn enough to buy back South Africa like Oprah but probably more than the majority of us here.

I find US tv simply unwatchable and if it is anything like the futur of googletube you can be sure that I'll be amongst the first to install "video ad block" or whatever the name will be. The cost of hosting video produced by other's can't be anywhere near the cost of producing a decent TV show so I don't see why they would need such an ad stream revenue to be profitable.