mbutts@mentor.com (Mike Butts) (10/31/89)
From article <12537945660.39.KLH@NIC.DDN.MIL>, by KLH@NIC.DDN.MIL (Ken Harrenstien): > > From: zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!mbutts@uunet.uu.net (Mike Butts) > I wonder if the commercials on closed-captioned programs are captioned as well? > Perhaps the absence of captioning could be used to detect commercial breaks on > such programs... > > Sorry. In real life, it's the other way around -- more often than > not, the commercials are captioned and the program isn't. Well then, how about fully decoding the captions into ASCII text and developing a computer program which is clever enough to identify commercial content? This idea probably has the same failings due to inconsistency, although if commercials are more commonly captioned, it would be more effective. As captioning decoders become more commonly used and well-known, then more advertisers may insist on captioning and the inconsistencies may decrease. But then, if a captioning-based commercial killer became practical, commercialized, and widely used, it could kill off captioning; killing off one socially undesirable activity at the expense of a desirable one would be a poor trade. (Unless it only killed off the captioning of commercials ;-) As an aside, one of the minor characters in Sagan's entertaining SF novel about SETI ("Contact" is the title, I believe) is one of the richest and most powerful people on earth because he invented, patented and commercialized a foolproof commercial killer. -- Michael Butts, Research Engineer KC7IT 503-626-1302 Mentor Graphics Corp., 8500 SW Creekside Place, Beaverton, OR 97005 !{sequent,tessi,apollo}!mntgfx!mbutts mbutts@pdx.MENTOR.COM Opinions are my own, not necessarily those of Mentor Graphics Corp.