Customer brief

To design, build and maintain a system capable of identifying airing commercials within the daily programming of television channels.

Product description

SpotFinder is a product for the identification of advertising campaigns of radio and television broadcasting. The operation entails that SpotFinder builds a library of all the commercials to be recognized. The library’s content can be provided by each ad agency, by end customers or generated in total autonomy from the broadcasted materials, thanks to the work of specialized operators. For each advertising spot, the audio track is extracted and refined into the channels to be tested (over 200 in the current setup). The search is made daily and the analysis is automatically filed in a log that certifies the actual airing of the individual spots, the channels concerned and the exact time of airing. The search and match algorithm is able to distinguish between two spots that also differ by a single word and to assign them correctly within the daily programming. As expected, the computational complexity is very high. For this reason, even considering the continuing nature of the analysis, it was necessary to develop the algorithm so that it can be run on a parallel processing and distribution cluster, optimizing it in terms of speed of execution, also in order to contain costs for required IT infrastructure.

Specification and technological peculiarities

Development of complex mathematical algorithms for audio analysis, optimization software for parallel and distributed calculations, creation of a data-processing clusters with high reliability, cluster management, continuous supervision, 24/24 system.