Launch HN: Taiv (YC W20) – Replace TV commercials with content people care about
We’re Noah, Avi, and Jordan from Taiv (https://www.taiv.tv). We make a box that lets sports bars and other businesses replace live TV commercials with content their customers actually care about.
A year and a half ago, I was sitting in a local bar and saw a commercial showing that the same beer I was drinking was cheaper across the street. The place I was in had other drinks on specials for way cheaper and great happy hour food, but they didn’t have an effective way to tell me about it. I ended up walking away feeling ripped off when I could have left a happy customer if they had been able to more effectively make me aware of their specials.
It got me investigating how businesses communicate with their customers. I found out that half of all restaurants close within a year and that one of the most common reasons they fail is because they’re unable to educate their customers about everything they offer and what events they have coming up. We built Taiv to give business owners a way to communicate with their customers, by showing content during commercial breaks on the TVs people are already watching.
Taiv uses custom hardware that lets us analyze the cable box’s video output in real-time. It also lets us switch between passing the content through, or showing videos from another input. But it turns out that a harder part of the problem is the analysis for classifying video. We compute a bunch of different heuristics and use the combination of their outputs to classify video as either a commercial or content. For example, one of our heuristics looks at average color balance over small periods of time. When the color balance shifts significantly, it indicates that a scene has changed. We use a bunch of other similar heuristics, which in combination, allow us to classify the stream with good accuracy.
Some of our customers have increased their sales by thousands of dollars a month. It also makes the experience a lot better for their customers. TV commercials are annoying and loud, and we replace that with relevant and non-intrusive content and music. Some of our customers even use the commercial breaks to show funny videos without any advertising at all. Not all of our customers are restaurants. We also work with car dealerships, car washes, hotels, and gyms to give them control over what they show and help them educate their customers.
One of the biggest challenges we’re facing is that we’re getting the most traction from larger enterprises, but are having trouble really connecting with smaller businesses. We think the product could be really valuable for them, especially since they don't usually have as much marketing reach. But we’re having trouble portraying the value of the system when they can’t track how it affects their revenue nearly as accurately. We’d love to hear the community’s experience and ideas in this area, as well as any questions or feedback!
124 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadHome viewers are a different thing.
Also, how accurate is it?
Accuracy is high and getting better every day. Right now, we get ~65% of all commercials, and false positives are super rare.
Side point, is there a master kill switch to turn it off during the Super Bowl?
Given the number of bars or restaurants I (used to) go to using some employee's Spotify stream as their music provider, I think the problem is that enforcement by the providers is basically impossible.
The same is true of pay-per-view fights. They charge based on capacity and it’s a multiple of whatever the residential rate is.
Now, enforcement isn’t perfect but there are people that do spot checks and if a bar is advertising a fight for example, that’s a surefire way of helping ensure there is a visit to make sure there is compliance. I have to think social media has only made this easier, as bars and restaurants use Facebook and Instagram to drive customers.
All of this is to say — although it sounds like this particular startup isn’t infringing on anything (at least not as we’ve seen in the other commercial skip/replacement lawsuits against Dish and the like), I would think guess that any sports bar paying for a premium sports package probably has something in the contract prohibiting this kind of behavior.
If I were a bar or restaurant owner, I certainly wouldn’t want to risk pissing off the multi-billion dollar leagues and corporations I rely on in part for my business. But that’s me.
The problem for businesses that want to go around those types of regulations isn’t that there isn’t a market for business owners who don’t care about music or broadcast licensing. There is one. The issue is the real target market for something like this startup is going to be a high-revenue/capacity bar or a chain. And those places tend to care a lot more about compliance.
I wouldn't count presidential debates, unless they were pre-rehearsed. And I wouldn't count political rallies since those are mostly attended in-person, not so often watched on TV. I guess the closest thing I can think of in the U.S. might be the State of the Union, but again, it's subjective whether or not that is propaganda (in THEORY it's not supposed to be).
Action movies that go over the top with "freedom" and "patriotism" and "America".
On a more serious note, this is actually a brilliant idea. I've been in places so many times and seen competitors commercials playing and always though it was not in their best interest.
It isn't too much trouble for our team to manage and it's a great value add for the businesses.
That said i personally still have cable (YouTube tv) in order to watch sports and cable news.
My solution was to simply stop watching or to watch older stuff.
My issues with ads are really much more with third party transactions—I want to be the customer they care about pleasing. Unlike, say, newspapers, or cable, or social media.
There’s a reason Pluto exists and has to get content deals with providers. There’s no free lunch.
The provider sells the service and the service is partially subsidized with local ad buys. You’re eating into that portion of the business.
If you can figure it out with the providers and scale, it will take off. I plan to follow along, good luck on the journey!
Is that a VGA decoder + some chip deployed with heuristics?
- It's unclear from your landing page what countries you support, as I get you need to train the service what is a commercial or not. Seems the team is Canada-based, but many YC companies start out US-only. As someone who is based in Europe, it'd be great to see what channels/countries you support up front.
- I filled out the "Ready to get started?" part, but it doesn't tell me what to expect, it just gives a green checkmark. I don't seem to have received any automatic email telling me what's about to happen either. I'd recommend you be more clear about what to happen. So before filling out the form, make clear what will happen if I do. And once submitted, tell me what's happening now. Will you reach out to me? Or will I receive a signup link? Tell me what to expect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Conte...
there's no pricing, making it look expensive
Adding more visuals could definitely help, ie two timelines, comparing ads shown in a traditional Tv vs ads using Taiv.
We also let the bars play music instead of the commercial's audio which usually helps the atmosphere a lot.
In particular for bars and restaurants, this works really well to turn annoying commercials into a useful feed of info for customers.
I’m not implying this won’t work at all. But not in bars where it wouldn’t already be acceptable to have screens for gambling, OTB or whatever. Unless I am wrong, but I consider myself something of a bar aficionado.
https://i.imgur.com/LkOQKCo.png
doesn't autoplay with ublock origin Chrome - the base still image should show two different images.
many people have autoplaying video off by default now.
Agreed, should just show an ad on the left, and a happy hour special on the right.
https://www.ccjdigital.com/tv-networks-sue-flying-j-for-bump...
It replaces ads in a unicast stream with targeting down to an account level - at least from a technical perspective. All server side. No box required.
Feel free to reach out if you want some feedback, advice or industry insights. Love your idea!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralf-zattoo/
If you digitize the cable stream, replace the ads, and display that on your in-house TV, you're probably violating copyright and/or some TOS.
But I guess no TOS says you can't change the channel when ads are showing, so why not have a little robot help you do that?
Wondering if there are any legal issues around this (can cable networks go after this saying it's their content)? What is being played on my TV is entirely up to me but then this argument breaks down in some cases (e.g. car odometer - I can't replace the reading). Might be worth nailing down.
I was in this space at one point. It's really really hard to sell to small restaurants. Most of them don't even have anyone who is familiar enough with technology to get it set up, so prepare for a a lot of hand holding to get it set up, even if it seems dead simple.
Most of the restaurants were willing to try something once, but if you couldn't prove ROI right away, they wouldn't do it again. And that will be really hard, because most of them aren't sophisticated enough to even find the ROI in their finances. A lot of them pretty much just use their bank account as their measure of profitability. They don't know how to do advanced accounting or how to discount one time purchases, etc.
Since your model is a one time payment, you'll probably have to do a free trial, which means all the effort of the install up front, and then possibly even more cost to remove it if they don't want it.
You'll need to build up a case study library. Figure out a way to quantify your ROI and build case studies. You'll probably have to volunteer to run their finances for them to help them find the ROI, or find a small business with a good accounting system.
Good luck! It's a really tough nut to crack, but if you can keep the price reasonable and show ROI, everyone will want it, especially if their competition has it.
ps. When you're setting these up, please make a strong suggestion to the owner that they turn on closed captioning for their TVs. :)
We did find that lots of businesses had a set budget for experimental expenditure like this so starting off with a 3 month (quarterly recurring) subscription worked pretty well. They were willing to spend upfront to try it out and several months were enough time to determine if it had any impact on their revenue.
Good luck!
Communication is so hard. People need information to help them get their needs met, but they may not know what to ask and they find it intrusive, aggressive and untrustworthy if you try to connect and get that info (about what they don't even know to ask).
I like the idea of passive communication channels for educating your customer unobtrusively. It can take a lot of repetition for them to understand the value of a thing and finally decide to try it.
To reach small businesses, you might try talking to Main Street programs in small towns and Chambers of Commerce. See if you can work with them to develop something in terms of presentation or packaging.
Main Street is a program for small towns trying to do economic development in historic town centers that have often been passed by in recent decades. They are typically looking to specifically foster local small businesses in their footprint.
It's a tough climate these days to be a small business. We need to be actively developing systems that support small business success. I feel like we are currently somewhat top heavy and it causes economic instability.
I'm involved as a volunteer in my local Main Street program. I run r/CitizenPlanners and I've posted some resources there about the Main Street program. This is the main overview: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/duf6ae/mai...
Main Street seems to be fairly hard to find, even if you know it exists. You Google it and get Disney references and song references.
Best of luck.
I recently attended a Show & Tell in my small city of 25,000 people. The attendees included people active in the Business Improvement District and multiple small business owners (including the owner of 3 local bars). If Taiv was local, I'm sure every bar in the county would know about their product within a month.
Obviously, my small town is a fraction of the size of Winnipeg, but sometimes it's all about staying out there until you find yourself at the right place at the right time and surrounded by the right people.
What needs to happen that we humans start to think?
This is true in the small business space, in general. You will find, that if you use a subscription model, that a significant percentage of your users will not re-up if the flow is complex in any way.
Some thoughts:
- setup needs to be as simple as HDMI/composite/component in from cable box, HDMI out to TV, power. LTE is preferred over wifi (wifi changes, setup difficulty)
- if you don't support hdcp, you're going to have unhappy customers (pretty sure the superbowl wont work in HD!). If you do support hdcp, you're going to have unhappy content providers. If you strip hdcp, you're going to get sued.
My local brewery has 2 cable boxes, and on one particularly busy Thursday night a TV was devoted to some rerun of a college basketball game. I wanted to them to switch to a hockey match, but that took a lot more time than one might expect. Not only did I have to get the bartender's attention, but she had to find the remote and figure out what channel it was on while awkwardly holding the controller close to the TV. While she was trying to take this action, there were other customers waiting, which clearly should take priority since serving them drinks would actually make the bar money while my request was just a courtesy.
It made me think about a hardware box and associated web site where patrons could upvote what they wanted to see on the TV. It would leave the mediation and decisions out of the staff's hands and let them focus on what makes the bar money. Obviously, a bar could blacklist certain channels to prevent trolling and the bartender could have final say in case of big events.
Taking this one step further, the device could also be used to determine an ideal event. Rather than leave the channel up to one's personal taste, the box would default to the most popular game/event at a particular time (as gathered by other boxes on the network). This way, patrons who don't know about the service are less likely to leave if they don't see the game playing when they walk into the bar.
I think someone else commented that it could be hard to justify this purchase with the advertising feature alone. This additional automation feature is easier to translate to bar mangers: they can stop being TV DJs and get back to making money. Bonus points: you still have a revenue stream if Cable Providers send out a Cease & Desist.