

Technology changed product placement - pjl
http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/22/technology-changed-product-placement/

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ChuckMcM
In the late 90's I had a Battlebots team and we made it to the televised
finals several times (and we were on Robotica a TLC show). The interesting bit
was that if you were on national TV, you could get a sponsor who would, in
exchange for their logo being on your T-shirt, provide consulting and
sometimes components for your robot. It was an interesting negotiation with
the production company as to whether or not they would 'blur out' the logos or
not.

This technology would let them make their own deal with some company and put
that logo on their instead, even if the competitor didn't like the team. Can
you imagine Nascar where the lead car _always_ has an STP Oil Additive
sticker? That would make it hard for a competitor to negotiate with sponsors,
or perhaps even _get_ sponsorship. Code that erases the Nike 'swoosh' in every
frame? No problem.

It also is interesting that it can cut Google out of the loop. I've wondered
how Google deals with people who put their own "direct" advertisement in their
Youtube videos while Google tries to monetize them with popup ads. Does Google
start blurring those 'integrated' ads out?

Going to be interesting, that is for sure.

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Someone1234
It is an interesting concept when applied to large groups (e.g. different
countries get different adverts), however I struggle to see how it would be
applied to smaller groups (e.g. age ranges, genders, etc) like the article
suggests.

Be it music videos, TV shows, or movies they're all delivered, right now, to
single large groups of people all at once. Almost every delivery medium (e.g.
YouTube, Cable TV, iTunes, etc) would need to have on-hand two dozen different
versions to make sure everyone gets their most appropriate ad. Seems
unrealistic.

I wouldn't say this kind of dynamic advertising is impossible, but the
technical hurdles to deliver different content to different groups seems
extremely costly and complex.

So we might see some of this in the coming years, but the hopes of this
company are clearly unrealistic.

PS - This is clearly a press release by Mirriad (the company behind this)

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rustyconover
It is not really all that hard to create all of the combinations for various
ads. You can cache the optical flow[1] analysis of the source video. The
optical flow won't change since it is determined by the source video. Then you
layer in your ad projection, render with final result with the ad and the
source video together and finally concatenate the rest of the video that
didn't require projection.

Being that the screen time for these ads is quite short in comparison to the
entire video, and the start and end times of visibility would be known for
each ad placement you can just splice together the actual targeted video and
not worry about the other parts of the video that don't have placements. Of
course Mirriad may not be so heavily optimized yet in the workflow, but hey,
they'll get there and it is only a few perl scripts with calls to ffmpeg
anyways.

As for the servers needing to store different versions of the video a few
points:

1\. Storage is cheap, bandwidth or CPU is expensive. And we're billing the
advertiser. Re-rendering videos for adaptive streaming is a cheap cost and
there isn't generally a real time requirement. 2\. If you don't want to store
multiple versions and are using HLS for streaming delivery, you can just
splice together the playlist of multiple optical flow rendered segments with
EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY.

The problem is delivery via Youtube and being able to do fine grained consumer
targeting. It would be better to be self hosted so you can use the various
consumer targeting services like BlueKai and not have to build an entire
segmentation platform.

[1] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow)

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xi_an
Jokes from 90's animated comedies coming true.

