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.
Sorry, but the only AI TV you’ll get has the job of analyzing your habits and selecting additional ads especially for you while completely trampling on your right or privacy.
“We’re sorry, using AI-based ad-blockers is a violation of our Terms of Service Agreement. Per the agreement terms, your account is now suspended and you’ve been charged an additional early termination fee, because fuck you.”
While I’m sure there will eventually be some grass-roots attempts, the providers will fight it to the death. A person can dream, though.
Then they’ll get sued by some rando, and the company won’t immediately ban other users but instead use their own version of AI generated ads that will figure out a way to increase all the ads, bypassing the blockers, and then they increase their subscription prices because the “pirates made us do it!”
Unfortunately this does not financially benefit the tv manufacturers, and may land them in trouble with the platforms they themselves advertise on (like Google).
They’re more likely to use AI to serve you more ads as an extra revenue stream; capitalism has gotta capital.
I recently read Contact(the book by Carl Sagan, still need to watch the movie), which features a tech billionaire who built his wealth doing exactly that. He developed a chip that could block TV commercials, and later one to filter televangelists as well.
For a book that was published in the 80s and set in the late 90s, it’s prescient in a few very specific ways. We weren’t exactly communicating by Portable Telefax in 1999, but adblockers were not far away either.
He also wrote (in the non-fiction 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World), “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
“See how you can call people with your telephone? It’s like that, but you can send text messages instead. All telephones have a little screen to display the message.”
I don’t think people from the 80s would have much trouble understanding sms, tbh.
Or, and hear me out, you could say “portable fax” and be done with it. YOU are making it complicated by not being culturally acclimated to the timeframe when it was written. Everyone knew what faxes were, no explanation was necessary.
Portable fax: thing that sends and receives messages
Portable Fax IS how you describe SMS in the 80s.
I dont mean that your understanding is unimportant, but that you inherently understand what’s being described to a degree that to hear it described differently than you expect you reject what you hear in favor of assuming the folks in the 80s needed more than “portable fax” to understand what you are on about.
Would you consider EFax to be portable Telefax (I assume that’s what Telefax was) or even email?
I haven’t read it, so I may be misinterpreting the terms.
It’s not a device that Sagan goes into much detail about, aside from it being a new and less-than-reliable technology in the early parts of the story. I always imagined it as a laptop-sized, wireless fax machine using cellular networks to share data. Characters mostly use paper documents throughout the book, and while there are some sci-fi technologies like holographic displays that advance throughout the story, Sagan never describes anything like portable computers or smartphones. Even the internet(or its closest approximation) never goes beyond a rudimentary data-sharing network for astronomers, never open to the public.
A quick google search tells me EFax would probably work over that network, sending documents from a desktop straight to someone’s Portable Telefax like an email, so you’re not far off.
