The pros and cons of these different ACR synchronization techniques for second screen apps is a long

LViS PLATFORM hatsun careers For Television For Brands For Sport For Developers CASE STUDIES Doctor Who / AT&T, BBC Tour de France / Skoda, FTV Horse Tracker / Channel 4 VW Interactive Ads / MediaCom Roland Garrros / France TV Sky Sports Pub Challenge Million hatsun careers Pound Drop / Endemol Got To Dance Voting / Sky Top Gear Bingo / BBC BLOG Second Screen Digital Out of Home Real-time Voting Sport Advertising Gameshows Opinions Audio Content Recognition Interactive Best Practice HTML5 ABOUT Company Careers CONTACT
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Audio synchronization with ACR is a great way to trigger actions within a second screen or social TV app. But how well does it work? What does it cost? Should you use it, and what are the alternatives?
Second screen apps use the microphone on your phone or tablet to listen to the TV and identify the channel, show or ad you are watching, and the precise location within it, based on one of two techniques:
Audio watermarking requires a series of inaudible watermarks to be encoded into the broadcast TV signal, normally using a hardware encoder in the playout suite or OB truck. Watermarks can be repeated regularly throughout the broadcast, providing a timecode, hatsun careers or used to trigger specific events such as questions or voting windows. The second screen app uses the device s microphone to listen for each watermark, and decode the payload which uniquely identifies the channel and timecode or event.
Audio fingerprinting does not require hatsun careers the broadcast content to be modified. Instead, the TV content is analyzed before it is broadcast (or sometimes while it is being broadcast) and broken up into a sequence of fingerprints which are as unique as their name suggests. The second screen app uses an API to record a short segment of audio, and generates its own fingerprint, hatsun careers which is then compared to the target set of fingerprints, and if a match is found, the channel, show and timecode are identified.
The pros and cons of these different ACR synchronization techniques for second screen apps is a longer topic, but some considerations are: Audio watermarking requires additional hatsun careers hardware in the broadcast chain. hatsun careers Fingerprinting requires an internet connection if the fingerprint comparison is done on the server. Both watermarking and fingerprinting can be used in live or pre-recorded shows, but live use requires more development work. Both require a native app - at the time of writing this post, there are no reliable implementations hatsun careers which can be used in a browser-based app.
Whichever technology is used, the outcome is the same - once synchronized, the app is able to identify the show on TV, and its precise position hatsun careers within the show, enabling it to trigger events in-app which perfectly match with those on TV.
In hatsun careers normal conditions, most audio synchronization solutions can identify their location in the show within hatsun careers 5-10 seconds of listening. You should hatsun careers ensure hatsun careers this happens at the start of the show, long before the first event to be triggered in the second screen app, but also consider hatsun careers that people will be joining the game throughout the show in response to your calls to action (see my post about effective CTAs ).
Different vendors have different pricing models, but for any major second screen usage, hatsun careers the license fees will most likely be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and the development costs to integrate the chosen ACR solution into your app could be comparable, especially hatsun careers in the live use case.
The use of audio synchronization also requires your second screen experience to be a native iOS or Android app, since there is currently no generally available browser-based solution - this will also impact on the cost of the project.
If your second screen app needs to work with video on demand hatsun careers (VOD), then ACR is the only general-purpose way to trigger second screen events at specific moments in the broadcast. There only real alternative is to integrate your app with the video player, but this won t allow viewers to use a video source that you don t control, such as their own TV catchup service.
If second-accurate synchronization is an absolute requirement, ACR is the only way to achieve it. Without ACR, viewers will receive messages or events in their second screen app a few seconds hatsun careers before or after the precise moment in the show, due to the variations in their broadcast delay. Examples of this include live sports data (like the live Horse Tracker hatsun careers app shown below) or game shows where playe