Putting Fresh Ads Into a Recorded Show

Posted on Friday, April 27, 2007 by MegaZone

The Fox Broadcasting Company is seeking to patent a way to replace “old” commercials with “new” ones when viewers replay Fox shows they have taped on digital video recorders.

Jon Nesvig, president for sales at Fox, part of the News Corporation, described the technology yesterday at a conference sponsored by the trade publication MediaPost. Fox hopes to test the process, developed by Andrew G. Setos, president for engineering at the Fox Group, with TiVo, Mr. Nesvig said.

Sounds fine to me, an ad for an ad, as it were. :-)

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  • davmoo

    Sounds fine to me too…I can skip a new ad just as fast as I can skip an old one ;-)

  • mrmac14

    I don’t really watch ads but I think this will be a good idea. I don’t know about some people but I will hold onto some shows for a couple of weeks (so that if a show was to bomb and get canceled fast I would have never have gotten involved in it so I will miss nothing) and when I finally do watch the show I hate looking at old ads for products that are already out or shows that have already aired.

  • leo_n_wi

    I don’t know about the rest of you people, but the last thing I want is some network using my broadband connection or more of my hard drive space saving commercials. Besides, those original advertisers paid for those spots, so unless unless the ads are being replaced by the same companies ads, I’d imagine they are gonna cry foul.

  • megazone

    TiVo already has reserved space on the hard drive for promos and things like this. Cable DVRs tend to as well. So that wouldn’t change.

    And, from the sound of it, the idea is that an advertiser would specifically buy an ad with a time window, which I’d expect to have a different ad rate from a standard ad.

  • thespeedz

    I think there is no harm in the idea.

    What I find odd is that Fox thinks they can patent existing tech.
    In reality, this could already be done.
    For quite some time, anyone could take TivoToGo and move the .tivo file to a computer.
    Several programs exist that can alter the .tivo file to delete or modify the comercials.
    The .tivo file could then be moved back to the unit.
    I just find it odd that they think they can patent this as it is not anything new.

  • megazone

    Editing video is not new. But that’s not what they’re doing.

    They’d be dynamically switching video streams on the fly. The original video file is not edited at all. But when the commercial comes on, the TiVo/DVR would switch to another stored video file with the ‘current’ commercial, then switch back to the original file on the fly when the ad is over. There would probably be some kind of flagging in the original video to mark the ads – like TiVo uses now for some of their ad tech.