npalansky

Great point. We built a web app that allows businesses to create, upload and schedule content to play during the commercials. Unfortunately, restaurant owners are way too busy for that and usually don't have marketing backgrounds so we now offer to create/manage their content for them.

It isn't too much trouble for our team to manage and it's a great value add for the businesses.

SCTE markers are encrypted & sometimes removed at the cable head-end. Even if they weren't stripped, it would be illegal to decrypt and look at them.

It's definitely a hard time for the restaurant industry, we're doing what we can to support our customers through this. The nice thing is that our customers see a pretty big ROI with our system and they need the revenue bump now more than ever (once they open back up).

In the meantime, we also work with quite a few car dealerships and autospas who aren't being hit quite as hard as the restaurant industry.

Our lawyers reached out to the people behind that suit. They found that the main issue was the way that their product handled copyright. We work differently and comply with those laws.

I think you're totally right about the pricing. interesting idea on the timeline as well. We'll look into both of these ideas.

That is awesome feedback! We will 100% try to incorporate both of these things. You're right that we only support Canada & the US, but should make this more clear from our landing page.

Totally valid concern. We've already had some conversations with the larger content providers who've been interested in partnering with us to make their ads more targeted and relevant. We're not looking for a free lunch. We just believe that businesses deserve some control and benefit from the ads they're being forced to show.

We never remove HDCP. All our components that touch the HDMI feed are HDCP certified.

From what we've heard, most people would rather see the happy hour promos than a toe fungus commercial while they eat, but I totally see where you're coming from.

We also let the bars play music instead of the commercial's audio which usually helps the atmosphere a lot.

That's a part of it, but we also pull off & pre-process quite a few heuristics to make the real-time video processing feasible

Thanks! The tech works the same, and we've thought about hooking into Spotify or something for this. The problem is that the hardware is too expensive right now to make sense (each box costs us $300).

Accuracy is high and getting better every day. Right now, we get ~65% of all commercials, and false positives are super rare.

Totally understand where you're coming from, we the same concern at the beginning. We read through a bunch of TOSs and found that some prohibit the bars from modifying the stream, but they're allowed to change the channel / input whenever they want. We specifically designed our hardware to comply with this by changing the input on the TV instead of modifying the cable stream.

I actually run the team behind this - really cool to see it come up here! It's a much harder problem than it sounds like at first. Our solution uses custom hardware and a lot of AI and has taken our 4 person team over 9 months to build. We are b2b for now, but that could always change. Hopefully we'll have some big updates to share soon!