This was the first time I've watched live broadcast US TV since leaving the country ten years ago. Are there any shows on, or is every channel besides PBS just advertisements all day?
Try listening to a music radio station sometime. I turned one on for the first time a 10 years a couple weeks ago and in a 45 minute drive heard approximately 2 songs. The entire rest was station identifiers and commercials.
The non-commercial band in the United States is 88-92FM. All the best (many college) stations will be in this band: KFJC, WFMU, KEXP... Radio is alive and well in the U.S., its just not commercial radio.
88.1-91.9 MHz is reserved for noncommercial educational (NCE) stations, so only they can use those frequencies. However, there's nothing that disallows NCE stations from operating on unrestricted frequencies (so long as they are licensed, of course). It's not very common, though, because radio spectrum is expensive.
One of my fondest "one of these days" project ideas: duct-tape a correlator to an RF front end, along with enough storage to "Tivoize" the local FM band. Record everything, recognize and redact any content that reoccurs within 30-second windows, and rebroadcast it for household/car consumption.
An even better idea, if you're preferential to radio DJs: have a recording setup and Shazam-like recognition system where a Spotify playlist or queue is made from what's being played. I was considering doing that as a project. The song choice by the radio DJs is the real value, and I sometimes prefer their playlists over my recommended daily mix playlists or whatever Spotify selects on the generated radio stations. The highest streaming quality option on Spotify is superior in audio quality to regular radio and the digital streaming options from radio websites. StationHead has been trying to do something similar, but they still include the social live host aspect.
Long before home computers were affordable, in a magazine for electronics hobbyists, I saw a design for an analogue circuit that could, it was claimed, remove advertising and DJ waffling from radio broadcasts. I think it just looked for the frequent short periods of silence that occur in speech so it can't have been very reliable. But it had a certain low-tech beauty.
I once had an ‘Intempo Rebel’ radio[1], about a decade ago, which had the selling point that it would record songs, from radio, as MP3, without any ads or DJs. It actually worked, from what I remember. It was magic to me at the time, and …still is.
Edit: it appears that its original name was PopCatcher [2], by a company with the same name
This is something modern AI could easily do. And it could go further: It could have 20 or so tuners built in (FM tuners are cheap) and constantly be scanning/listening for non-commercials/non-talk and songs in the genres you like.
Yeah, that's what I mean -- snarf up the whole 20 MHz-wide FM band and decode/analyze/edit/rebroadcast each channel concurrently in nearby unused channels. I'm sure there's a GNU Radio block somewhere that does the capture part already.
I built something like this, but, only for commercials, using RTL-SDR dongles and intel NUC's.
I never did figure out a way to monetize it, but, the thought was to that if you were pepsi, you could be alerted for coke's new commercials on a per-market or per-station basis, depending on how you wanted to pay for it.
I ended up turning the hardware into my P25 decoder for Hamilton County (currently running at https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz ), but, I would kinda love to get back into that space again.
Very cool. I did something similar for SmartNet trunking years ago, only it used a dedicated fat client. I stopped working on it when people were getting serious about rebanding and encrypted P25 in my area. Several years later, that still hasn't happened.
And yes, to be perfectly clear, what I had in mind was for removing commercials automatically. I was complaining about mindless DJ patter in my post, but that's not an issue on FM anymore. It's either not that mindless in the case of stations like KEXP, or it's nonexistent thanks to the Clear Channelization of everything else on the dial. In any case, I have no idea how I'd go about removing it reliably. Skipping repetitive commercials is a rudimentary DSP exercise, but skipping random DJ diarrhea would be an open-ended ML problem.
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the obvious solution would be to keep repetitive segments lasting at least ~3 minutes, and discard the rest. If I did it the way I was originally thinking about, I might still hear the commercial the first time it aired. But if I did it this way, I'd never hear any commercials at all, and would only miss the first appearance of a new song if I happened to be listening at the time.
$5/month is just an introductory price, after the first year it goes way up, to $16.99/month. A cheaper "Mostly Music" is $10.99/month with a reduced 80 channels (looks like nothing I'd miss) that is satellite only, no streaming over the Internet.
I've liked listening to a handful of channels on Sirius XM when it's already been enabled in rental cars but it's not worth the price.
AM radio stations work for me, none of the twaddle and blather that you experience on FM stations. There's also a lot more productive content on AM radio.
Even PBS has ads nowadays. At the beginning of a show, "sesame street was brought to you today by support from viewers like you, and..." (ad for abcmouse, some minivan, etc plays)
No, it used to be where they would mention the name of the company on a still image and a quick blurb, like the other poster's youtube link. Now the company gets a whole 30 second ad like any other channel.
That’s how public broadcasting works in the US. A number of other countries manage to have public broadcasting without any private advertisements or sponsorship. (For example, Australia’s ABC.)
I really wish YT would drop the 10 minute cutoff for mid-roll ads. It's a destructive incentive to the platform. Let creators put ads wherever they want on whatever length video they want (within reason and with abuse checks). Then you won't get 7 minute videos with 3 minutes of added fluff just so they can be better monetized.
And we can ignore creators who over-monetize if we want (or buy Premium or use adblocking).
> The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content.
I heard about this a few months ago, and have since checked when the actual content starts in the videos I watch. I certainly can't agree with 30%, usually in 15-minute videos, the introduction is 1-2 minutes before they go into the meat. The bigger problem is all the filler, sponsorship breaks, "remember to ring the bell" etc., that occur at seemingly random points, though I don't think it adds up to 30% filler even if you count all that. Maybe I just skip over most of the garbage.
> And yet YouTube videos themselves are approximately 30% non-content.
That's "non-useful" content rather than "non-content", those 30% are intro and filler which you might also find in non-youtube content. And obviously it also depends strongly on what kind of content you're using youtube for. Skipping the first 30% of a recital is probably going to skip interesting content.
I was thinking the same just days ago after watching a live broadcast since the shutting down of analog TV (never bothered to install an antenna even after buying a new HD TV) i said to myself, no wonder cord cutting is a thing, for every 2 minutes of content you get 15 of mind numbing ads.
