AutoHop secrets revealed??

[CJPC]

Wow, that is crazy.......

It is, but if you break it down - not so much!

Lets assume that your typical 30 minute show has 3 commercial breaks, around 3 minutes each (roughly). You need the start and end time for each break. Luckily, they don't usually mess with the commerical timings across airtimes for most content.

So, even on 30 minute blocks, from 8-11PM, 6 30 minute blocks by 3 breaks, thats 18 "commercial start" and 18 "commerical end" times. You could pay 4 people min. wage to watch a show, and press a button when a commercial starts, and press a button when a commercial stops. Much cheaper than dealing with automation, and contending with networks.

Edit: Your automation can come in upon those "button presses" that will record the time, and after cross checking (against other users?) assumedly transfer it to the hopper at the alloted time. The Hopper would then que up the list of "when to skip", and just auto-skip if the show and airing matches against it's updated database.

For all we know, Dish could be crowd-sourcing the data, say the Hopper reports back after each PTAT recorded show playback. Users do the work by auto-skipping the commercials, the largest skipped time areas get overviewed, and pushed back to other users > 1AM.

 

[PATECO]

Wasn't Replay tv's method fully automated? Dish could use that method and just skip instead of deleting the ad.

 

[mike123abc]

I could probably mark commercials in about 5 minutes per hour of programming. Probably even faster once I had more practice. Just use the 30 second skip until you find a commercial block, then back up to the start mark, skip ahead until you find programming back up and end mark. One knows a commercial block is going to be at least 1 minute long (more like 3+), so skip forward will find them pretty fast with little chance of missing one. So, 3 hours by 4 networks is 12 hours to go through, I would estimate an experienced person could do in around an hour real time.

Now they probably would do one in each feed (east/west) then they could quickly review each DMA by seeing if they are lined up. If not they would have to flag that DMA as needing a manual walk through (in case of tape delays).

They could start after lets say the first hour, get it marked then start running through DMAs to be sure they lined up. Maybe with a few people manage to get it all done around the time hour 2 is done recording...

 

[Jhon69]

Wasn't Replay tv's method fully automated? Dish could use that method and just skip instead of deleting the ad.

Don't know if they still do,but when I was with D* they bought the Replay patents,if E* would use that they could open themselves up for litigation from D*.

 

[jimdandyvi]

To make this difficult the network affiliate in each market could simply add a variable delay. All they need is the equivalent of a DVR and when the network feed starts just delay there start for variable amount of time. For that matter the station could just wait for the first commercial and add a delay at the end before returning to the network feed. During the evening they could add to the delay or even catch up so the people reviewing the recording just could not add a fixed time to the commercial start and stop times. With hundreds of DMAs you would then need many more people to manually review the broadcasts.

 

[mike123abc]

To make this difficult the network affiliate in each market could simply add a variable delay. All they need is the equivalent of a DVR and when the network feed starts just delay there start for variable amount of time. For that matter the station could just wait for the first commercial and add a delay at the end before returning to the network feed. During the evening they could add to the delay or even catch up so the people reviewing the recording just could not add a fixed time to the commercial start and stop times. With hundreds of DMAs you would then need many more people to manually review the broadcasts.

Well the computer could match the audio track. You edit lets say NY's feed. Then match the network feed's audio with other DMAs. Tape delays would not matter as long as the local affiliate showed the network programming - the computer adjusts the locals cuts to match the network audio from NY. The local viewers would be pretty upset if the locals started to cut out portions of the shows to try to defeat the hopper...

 

[snarlyoldman]

With 115 million television households in the U.S. I seriously doubt that a handful of Dish subscribers with Hoppers are going to cause a serious downturn in the economy. Very clever feature though. Even though my 922 just got the S117 software I think it is probably time to upgrade. I'll probably get my Sling adapter tomorrow too, before the price increase Monday.

 

[dangue]

This seemed like the best place to put this observation. On Friday, my local NBC affiliate preempted national broadcast programming to air local baseball. Accordingly, they shifted the normal programming to a sister station. I recorded the season finale of Grimm by manually creating a timer and restoring it in the DVR menu (when I created the timer, the guide hadn't been updated to reflect the local baseball and the receiver thought it would record via PTAT).

Anyhow, I'm about to start watching the show and the autohop feature is available for it. Keep in mind that it was not recorded using PTAT and was not broadcast on a PTAT channel (although the local does happen to be on the same spotbeam as my PTAT locals).

So, it seems like they may have the ability to tag any PTAT show that they've worked their magic on and turn on autohop for it even if it wasn't recorded via PTAT or on a PTAT channel. This is all speculation on my part based on this one point of reference, but I figured it'd be worth sharing.

 

[GaryPen]

Wow, that is crazy.......

Yes. It is.

 

[mike123abc]

This has turned into a great publicity stunt for Dish, and the networks with all their protests are just fueling the fire. No one could remember a Dish ad before (and probably still could not), but a lot are hearing about "this Hopper thing"....

 

[Barry Erick]

I've seen CC being displayed for a commercial at times, so I'm not sure how that would work.

Shows usually do not have formatted cc (where a byte specifies where on the screen and another one, the font to use to display CC. Commercials do have formatting characters on it. We experimented with something like auto hop to tell us when a commercial was running. No closed caption or a positioning or font change came we could detect the spot. Several years ago for an internal project. It sounds like the same idea. Look at the cc spec (google it) and these items become apparent.

 

[oldengineer]

I had a Dell machine running Windows Media Center 2005. There were free utilities you could download that would remove commercials from a recording that worked mainly by looking for blacker than black intervals which occurred at the beginning and end of commercial breaks.

I have also noticed that more commercials are using CC. I guess I now know why.

 

[Barry Erick]

I had a Dell machine running Windows Media Center 2005. There were free utilities you could download that would remove commercials from a recording that worked mainly by looking for blacker than black intervals which occurred at the beginning and end of commercial breaks.

I have also noticed that more commercials are using CC. I guess I now know why.

Because the FCC is requiring it. First phased in was newscasts. That was simple. Take the telepromter feed and send it to the cc encoder. Then live shows. A fast inputter was needed and we used an outside source that we fed audio to and they incrypted it. Then to phase in was commercials. The FCC, when I retires in 2010, was at that stage and it was scheduled to be completed by now.

 

[ScottChez]

I am guessing it is manual as for my DMA who ever is watching and putting in the skips often falls a sleep and I end up watching a lot of the commercial anyway,

 

[120inna55]

It's surprising to me that after this much time, precisely how autohop works is still not known. Only speculation (albeit probably close to the truth) so far.

 

[KAB]

It's surprising to me that after this much time, precisely how autohop works is still not known. Only speculation (albeit probably close to the truth) so far.

Directv knows...they just have to get the b*lls to switch it on.

 

[DishSubLA]

This seemed like the best place to put this observation. On Friday, my local NBC affiliate preempted national broadcast programming to air local baseball. Accordingly, they shifted the normal programming to a sister station. I recorded the season finale of Grimm by manually creating a timer and restoring it in the DVR menu (when I created the timer, the guide hadn't been updated to reflect the local baseball and the receiver thought it would record via PTAT).

Anyhow, I'm about to start watching the show and the autohop feature is available for it. Keep in mind that it was not recorded using PTAT and was not broadcast on a PTAT channel (although the local does happen to be on the same spotbeam as my PTAT locals).

So, it seems like they may have the ability to tag any PTAT show that they've worked their magic on and turn on autohop for it even if it wasn't recorded via PTAT or on a PTAT channel. This is all speculation on my part based on this one point of reference, but I figured it'd be worth sharing.

Right. We now know that Autohop is done MANUALLY. A person MANUALLY sets the points for AutoHop. We know further, that Dish makes this AutoHopped version as a separate recording or copy for quality assurance. That copy is then sent to--Kentucky or somewhere--where it is viewed to verify Autohop skips ONLY the commercials and none of the program content is skipped. This is in the thread about 9th Circuit upholding lower court's ruling allowing Dish to continue using AutoHop during court proceedings and trail.

 

[Barry Erick]

I am sure they do not watch each show.. FF/REW and get the captioning at each break. And if that gets messed with, record time code for each show and base it on time of day so it is unique for each show and use that for the trigger. Very easy to do.

 

[DishSubLA]

Actually, they do watch each show, and I can understand why. If ANY of the program content is skipped, it would give the big nets grounds for Dish having "altered" their content, a breach of contract and copyright. However, the 9th circuit had mead it clear that the nets do NOT have copyright to the COMMERCIALS, and since that is what is being "skipped" the big nets have no grounds, so long as the PROGRAM CONTENT is not altered or being skipped. Learning Dish performed the AutoHop manually was a shocker because we all just assumed in this age of software, etc., it just had to be automated, but it's not. What is consistent is the exact times the commercial inserts begin and end for each show with each show starting at 00:00:00 then counting (not time of day), no matter what time zone.

 

[rdale]

If it is done manually, why does it show any of the commercials? The first auto hop shows about 10 seconds and the rest 2-4 seconds. If someone is doing this manually, why does he always mistime it by a few secs?