Problem Statement
Imagine watching live sports, fully immersed in the excitement, when suddenly, loud and irrelevant advertisements break the flow. These ads, often poorly scripted, disrupt your experience—even if you’ve paid a premium for the channel or OTT platform.
This ruins the entire vibe. Instead of ads, viewers should see either a calming screen with “Your content will resume shortly” or live visuals from the ground to maintain the energy and engagement. The problem is, we’ve never truly experienced ad-free live sports, so we don’t realize how much better it could be. Even with premium subscriptions, we’re forced to sit through ads, missing out on a seamless sports experience.
Approach
The idea is straightforward: put viewers in control. When an advertisement begins, you can choose to mute the TV, completely replace the ad with “Your content will resume shortly,” or leave it unchanged. This transforms the user experience, delivering an unmatched level of immersion.
To make this possible, we’re building a system that identifies and replaces advertisements in real-time. Using video and audio feeds, we analyze each frame to detect and replace ad content seamlessly. Our approach involves multiple techniques like machine learning models, video fingerprinting, and audio fingerprinting to create a unified solution.
The system is designed to run on a central server, solving compute challenges for the end user. A similar concept exists in Samsung’s Freestyle projector, which mutes advertisements on select Indian news channels. However, major sports events, heavily reliant on ad revenue, have yet to adopt such advancements.
Challenges
While I am close to a technical POC solution, the legal aspects remain a significant hurdle. Ensuring compliance with broadcasting and copyright laws is crucial before we can release this to the public.