Instead we generate counts by looking at
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 7:35 am
Because we are working from the source, we know we aren’t being misled. On the flip side, this means that we can only report counts for the channels we actively track and record. In the first phase of our project, we tracked more than 20 markets in 11 key primary states (details here.) We’re now in the process of planning which markets we’ll track for the general elections. Our main constraint is simple: money. Capturing TV comes at a cost.
A lot can go wrong here. Storms can affect reception, packets can be lost or corrupted before they reach our servers. The result can be time shifts or missing content. But most of the time the data winds up sitting comfortably on our hard drives unscathed.
searching television
Video is terrible when you’re trying to look for a whatsapp lead specific piece of it. It’s slow, it’s heavy, it is far better suited for watching than for working with, but sometimes you need to find a way.
There are a few things to try. One is transcription; if you have a time-coded transcript you can do anything. Like create a text editor for video, or search for key phrases, like “I approve this message.”
The problem is that most television is not precisely transcribed. Closed captions are required for most U.S. TV programs, but not for advertisements. Shockingly, most political ads are not captioned. There are a few open source tools out there for automated transcript generation, but the results leave much to be desired.
Introducing audio fingerprinting
We use a free and open tool called audfprint to convert our audio files into audio fingerprints.
An audio fingerprint is a summarized version of an audio file, one that has removed everything except the most “interesting“ pieces of every few milliseconds. The trick is that the summaries are formed in a way that makes it easy to compare them, and because they are summaries, the resulting fingerprint is a lot smaller and faster to work with than the original.
A lot can go wrong here. Storms can affect reception, packets can be lost or corrupted before they reach our servers. The result can be time shifts or missing content. But most of the time the data winds up sitting comfortably on our hard drives unscathed.
searching television
Video is terrible when you’re trying to look for a whatsapp lead specific piece of it. It’s slow, it’s heavy, it is far better suited for watching than for working with, but sometimes you need to find a way.
There are a few things to try. One is transcription; if you have a time-coded transcript you can do anything. Like create a text editor for video, or search for key phrases, like “I approve this message.”
The problem is that most television is not precisely transcribed. Closed captions are required for most U.S. TV programs, but not for advertisements. Shockingly, most political ads are not captioned. There are a few open source tools out there for automated transcript generation, but the results leave much to be desired.
Introducing audio fingerprinting
We use a free and open tool called audfprint to convert our audio files into audio fingerprints.
An audio fingerprint is a summarized version of an audio file, one that has removed everything except the most “interesting“ pieces of every few milliseconds. The trick is that the summaries are formed in a way that makes it easy to compare them, and because they are summaries, the resulting fingerprint is a lot smaller and faster to work with than the original.