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Comments: 121 + - TiVo-Like Service Coming To Australia on Wednesday July 28 2004, @04:12AM
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rosy writes with good news for Australian television watchers: "CNET.com.au is reporting that a TiVo-like service will be available in November this year. Dubbed ICE ("Intelligent Content Engine") and developed by Peter Vogel, the technology will be built into set top boxes and personal video recorders to skip ads or lower the volume, view electronic program guides, etc. The article states that the service will cost $2-3 per week with the service launching initially in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong."
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Oz Tivo (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oz Tivo (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)
When did pr0n start having ads in the middle of the show, and why would you want to lower the volume?
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Let me translate for you..
It means you can skip the dialogue and plot, and allows you to instantly switch "channels" much like the good ole "boss key".
Parent
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)
Ads and Spams (Score:2, Interesting)
If spams are anything like ads, maybe it's time someone looks into doing something similar (live monitoring) for spams.
Re:Ads and Spams (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ads and Spams (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, we really need live monitering stations were people sit and watch/read every email.
Oh wait we already have that. They just call it Echelon.
TV (Score:5, Funny)
almost.
Cyberpunk (Score:2, Funny)
That's not like TiVo... it's like ReplayTV (Score:5, Interesting)
About time -- but will it be legal? (Score:2)
Only problem is that the very narrow 'fair dealing' defence in the copyright act might not even allow the sort of home copying allowed in the US under Betamax.
If that's the case, this thing could have an unfortunately short life... :(
Re:About time -- but will it be legal? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that is not correct. According to this pdf document [copyright.org.au] you need permission from all the copyright holders to legally copy a television show in Australia. There are exceptions (such as educational purposes) but they don't include for personal use only. This still hasn't stopped millions of VCRs (note the R for recorder) from being sold in this country. I doubt it will stop the Aussie version of the Tivo.
For more information of Australian copyright I suggest The Australian Copyright Council [copyright.org.au].
skribe
Parent
who wouldn't pay for no ads (Score:5, Insightful)
And for those of you who enjoy commercial breaks so you can run and get more chips or ice cream...remember, you can always just pause it!
Re:who wouldn't pay for no ads (Score:2)
You'd need to live really close to the chip shop for that!
Lowering the volume on ads (Score:5, Interesting)
I have noticed a disturbing trend on British cable TV channels where adverts are considerably louder than the main programmes, presumably to try and grab your attention. In reality, it's just annoying.
I normally channel surf or watch five minutes of a rolling news channel anyway, although now a lot of channels seem to have syncronised their ad breaks to try and stop you doing that. I expect such a feature would come under a lot of fire here (and probably in Aus too) from the very people who make it necessary.
One question though: how does it detect adverts?
Re:Lowering the volume on ads (Score:5, Informative)
There are two methods that I know of. The first is to measure the sound volume - breaks for advertising often will have a pause in audio, then the actual advertising audio level will usually be higher than the programming audio. There was actually such a project (muting audio from commercials automatically) featured in an electronics magazine a number of years back - try looking up back issues of Popular Electronics.
The second way is to measure the video signal in much the same way as you would audio. There used to be a blanking interval as the advertisments were cut into the program feed. ReplayTV relies on this, along with the MPEG scene-detection algorithms to determine when a scene starts and stops, and whether that scene is likely to be an advertisement.
Of course, TV stations are wise to this these days. ReplayTV units often have problems detecting commercials because of the stupid station ID logo burned into the screen - this prevents the screen from going totally black, which usually signals a commercial (not always - I've had my ReplayTV mistakenly cut out a chunk of the program because there was a lightning effect). Also, TV stations have begun putting in sidebars and strips at the top and bottom for advertising and junk messages, which also spoils the commercial detection algorithm, and cross-dissolve to commercials, which eliminates a pause in either the video or audio.
Checking the sound level seems to be the best bet, and if you can couple that with scene detection, and some sort of intelligent algorithm that figures out that the next 5 scenes are a collection of 30 sec and 1 min spots, and are likely to be commercials, that, I think is the way to go. Of course, if you want to do that, you'd probably have to buffer the programming, which then precludes you from channel surfing.
Parent
Re:Lowering the volume on ads (Score:2)
Re:Lowering the volume on ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lowering the volume on ads (Score:5, Funny)
Actually the ads aren't louder but they do have more impact. This is mostly due to sound compression, where the softer parts of the ads are raised a few decibels in order to reduce the dynamic range of the sound.
This is true; the commercials effectively turn the volume of your television up to 11.
Parent
Re:Lowering the volume on ads (Score:2, Informative)
RTFA.
Vogel showed off the majority of the ICE service's functionality at an event in Sydney this morning, including the ability to control the volume level of advertisements (dubbed "ICE Hush") automatically..
For the masses, maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
With some old leftover hardware and a $150 TV card, it was ridiculously easy to set up, even though a little Linux experience did help. Sure, the commercial detection is "programmed" and prone to miss commercials or (on occasion) think that the program itself is the commercial, but when it's free and includes most, if not all of what these PVR boxes will, having that "up-to-the-second" information isn't really all that vital.
Re:For the masses, maybe. (Score:2)
I'd pay for the service if it had accurate EPG data. I built a DVB-MythTV box of my own. It's usually great but recently I've had problems with "reality shows" that go overtime. I don't watch reality shows but because they play 15-30 minutes too long it ruins anything I'm recording on that channel aft
Re:For the masses, maybe. (Score:2)
For this particular person that reads Slashdot, the full question is "Why don't you shut the hell up until you can actually market a turnkey MythTV box that competes with the likes of TiVo?" I tinker enough with technology all day long and I will gladly pay good money so I don't have to tinker some more just to replace a VCR.
With some old leftover hardware and a $150 TV card, it was ridiculously easy to set up, even though a little Lin
Re:For the masses, maybe. (Score:3, Informative)
With respect, I disagree. I too have been playing with a PVR for a few months, but I did the sums in my head (2 x PCI DVB-T tuners, big HDD, fast Pentium 4, motherboard, ram, case, tv-out card, remote control) and went for a commercial product. The Topfield (Toppy) TF5000PVRt [topfield-a...lia.com.au] cost me just AUD$900, and I couldn't come close to buying the abovementioned hardware for that, even before I got to thinking about the weeks/months of screwing about with an
Tivo here in Oz ready or not (Score:2)
tivo site for making australian Tivo [tuhs.org]
Tivo Weeknees [weaknees.com]
its a service? (Score:2)
Re:its a service? (Score:2, Informative)
Click on the Mystery Futures Link [tradesims.com]!
Im not sure if it will be a hit here.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont think Australians are real heavy tv watchers, as pay-tv here is no where as popular as it is in other parts of the world. And if people dont want ads, they buy pay-tv services. I wouldn't pay a few dollars a week to record/filter ads from free to air tv. I mainly just turn it off.
So even thought I could see that this would have a market, I don't think it will be as big as Tivo in the American market.
Re:Im not sure if it will be a hit here.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not so sure about that - pay tv services here suffer the same extortion racket that they seem to in the US - bundling.
Until I can order Pay TV a la carte there's no way I'd cough up AUD50+ / month to get collection of crap plus one or two channels of interest.
But in lieu of that, $2 or 3 per week for ad blocking, plus PVR services? Yes plea
Re:Im not sure if it will be a hit here.. (Score:3, Informative)
Could that be anymore clueless? 1> You still get ads on the free-to-air channels regardless of whether or not you have cable. 2> All Foxtel channels have commercials.
Will Tivo in Australia work? I doubt it. But pay-tv is certainly NOT an alternative to get rid of commercials.
Re:Im not sure if it will be a hit here.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I may be wrong, but my understanding of cable TV here in Australia has been that our population is simply too sparse to support wide-spread roll outs. Foxtel and a few other operators have cable around the big three cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane... what about Perth and Adelaide?) but everywhere else requires satellite. And satellite is an extra hassle, and I'm guessing is more expensive for the operator.
But I think you're also right about us not being "real heavy tv watchers". I used to get Foxtel
Won't happen in New Zealand (Aussie's neighbour) (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright.
The TV broadcasters consider their program listings to be their intellectual property and that they're protected by copyright.
Similar copyright cases (both here and in Australia) have been won by the companies which publish other collections of data such as telephone directories (example [news.com.au])
Anyone who attempts to publish TV program schedules without the permission of the broadcaster (and they charge like wounded bulls for giving such permission) will be set upon by multiple teams of corporate lawyers.
Of course someone intent on providing a scheduling service for a Tivo-like system could always try and buy the rights to publish those listings but I bet you any money you like that those rights would come with the caveat that ad-blocking was forbidden. After all, advertising revenues are the lifeblood of a free-to-air broadcaster so they're not about to allow someone to provide a service that cuts ads are they?
Personally I think someone should fight the broadcasters over their copyright claims -- after all, copyright is supposed to protect the presentation, wording and format of data, not the facts on which that data is based.
If I create listings from scratch and simply include the program title, genre, start and finish times then that information should not be covered by any form of copyright.
But, fighting the corporate sharks costs lots of money so I doubt we'll see a test-case here in NZ anytime soon.
Re:Won't happen in New Zealand (Aussie's neighbour (Score:2)
(nothing to see here.. move along) (Score:3, Funny)
regards,
Sydney.
Re:(nothing to see here.. move along) (Score:2, Funny)
least we don't have the mardi gras
Re:(nothing to see here.. move along) (Score:2)
Cutting out Ads? (Score:2)
The same guy who did the Fairlight. Cool! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ghservices.com/gregh/fairligh/
In any case (and back on topic), I hope he has better luck business wise this time. As was typical with great engineers with good ideas at that time (think Clive Sinclair) they never had the acumen to cash in on their great technology. Those MBA graduates do sometimes come in handy
how about the bugs? (Score:2)
The Aussie TV stations tend to use the cheapest gear they can lay their hands on and that means NTSC/60Hz and that results in some odd issues when you take a video of a cricket ball moving over a field that was recorded at 50Hz/PAL and then converted to 60Hz/NTSC mpeg encoded, moved 1/2 around the world via sat and converted back to 50Hz/PAL. Add in a bug and watching the jitter and it makes me feel like I'm car sick. The result is I don't
Re:Smarter than a TiVo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Australia is geographically the same size as the United States, even though it has 1/10th of the population. The fewer number of television stations (3 commercial, 2 government-owned and in some places 1 community) is driven in part by govenment regulation and in part by economics. A country of ~20 million people cannot support the same number of commercial stations as a country of ~200 million.
Pay TV only arrived in Australia 7 years ago and has only been accessible to most for the past 3-4 years. The ratings for Pay TV are pretty poor, since the commercial free-to-air stations have first pick at a lot of things - sport in particular - to protect people from "having" to pay for TV.
Parent
Re:Smarter than a TiVo... (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people know that: 7617930 != 9161923
and hence they aren't "the same size". Over 80% of the size, yes. Almost the same size, yes. But not just "the same size".
A country of ~20 million people cannot support the same number of commercial stations as a country of ~200 million
That's true, it remains true even though the US population is ~300 million (290 million+ makes ~200 million a bit off).
[we now return to your less pedantic programmi
Re:Smarter than a TiVo... (Score:2)
Of course, Austrailia has many fewer total over the air TV stations than the USA does thanks in part to its smaller geographic size, so this service is much more practical there than it is here.
>>
Spoken like someone who has no idea where Australia is or has the slightest idea how big it is.
Australia is geographically the same size as the United States, even though it has 1/10th of the population. The fewer number of television stations (3 commercial, 2 government-owned and in some places 1 commu
Re:Smarter than a TiVo... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm an Australian too by the way, and I find that most foreigners don't underestimate the size of Australia (it's pretty evident by looking at a globe) but are surprised by it's low population.
I find that most foreigners don't underestimate the size of Australia, but a lot of Septics overestimate the size of the USA.
Re:Smarter than a TiVo... (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, most people don't learn about other contries by looking at a globe (when was the last time you looked at one?) -- they look at a map. World maps in 2-D can be pretty misleading. Many people see the Mercator projection [worldatlas.com], which does make the US look bigger than Australia (especially if country borders are not included). Compare the difference in an equal-area projection map [flourish.org].
Re:Smarter than a TiVo... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, I'd be happy enough if the NOW / NEXT info was accurate. Though the info from the ABC, at least here in Brisbane, is within a second or two - when it's working, that is...
Note for Americans : Australia, in the capital cities, has 5 FTA stations:
Re:Europe (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Europe (Score:2)
Shame that the marketing might of the Murdoch media empire squashed competition in this country yet again on this one. Happily we got hold of a TiVo before they became too scarce and still enjoy the (full) service.
Re:Open-Source Tivo-style recommendations? (Score:2)
Not sure who, but someone apparently owned copyright over it and TV guides licenced it from them. PVR websites which screen-scraped were hunted down and apparently its now an arms-race.
Hopefully someone knows more than me.
Re:Tivo is crap (Score:2)
Anyone who doesn't buy the TiVo service has completely missed the point, however, and through stubbornness and miserlyness is missing out on th