We mostly watch news and sports in my house. So unfortunately, live TV. Occasionally we watch other things. I mute the commercials and browse my phone when they’re on.
But I would love a TV that is smart enough to auto hide & mute every kind of ad. Even little logos on the athletes’ uniforms. Hide the ads on the pitcher’s mound. Hide the billboards and signs in the stadium. Show some cool little generic animation, music video, or slide show during commercial breaks. Hide the damned popup window ads and scrolling ads that some channels do. Remove product placements from movies and shows. Basically make all ads completely vanish.
It wouldn’t be a TV itself, it would be an extra box you feed the TV signal into for filtering, then out to the TV itself.
This has been done previously for language filtering with hilarious results. It was called “TVGuardian”, oh, almost 30 years ago now.
It translated “the Dick Van Dyke Show” to “Jerk Van Gay”.
Here is a video (24:27) by Technology Connections talking about the TV Guardian. There’s also this video (20:59) by Ben Eater, who looks at the memory chip on the device to figure out how it works. It’s pretty neat, and I recommend both videos if you have some spare time.
To be fair, Dick Van Dyke is ALREADY a hilarious name. Not even sure how that made it past 1950s censors who wouldn’t let Ricky and Lucy sleep in the same bed, or Barbra Eden show her belly button.
Because it’s his actual legal name. It’s not some snarky name they created for the show.
