How would you go about designing an 'ad-blocker' for streaming radio?

Question

I can't stand listening to conventional radio because I can't stand listening to ads. (The same goes for TV, where commercials are 200% louder than what you are trying to watch.)

Unfortunately, my wife needs to listen to the radio while getting ready in the morning.

I was thinking, we have plugins to block ads in our web browsers, why not for the radio?

Most radio stations offer their content streaming over the web. How would you got about designing an ad-blocker? Can you foresee any gotchas?

UPDATE

A couple points that came up...

What to replace the ads with: silence would be fine.

Identifying Ads: maybe the first time an add plays it wouldn't be recognized, but you would have to signal the software that this is an ad. The ad would be recorded. Would it be possible to process it and extract some kind of unique 'signature' so that the next time it plays it is recognized and muted?

Answer 1

I feel the same urging need on the french radio networks. For a computer-based solution, here is my opinion about 3 issues in the process.

1. Recognize when Ad is playing

1.1 A manual [Shut up] button would be useful : press it whenever you hear annoying Ads. It is reliable (though a little late), and the "alert" could be broadcast to a community tool over the internet.

1.2 Receive a "this is an Ad" signal from the internet (regardless if human or software generated).

1.3 Analyze signal, compute signature, and compare with a community database on the internet.

1.4 Analyze signal to find higher loudness than average.

1.5 Analyze signal to find sentences spoken faster than average.

1.6 Analyze signal to find suspicious phrases like "cheap", "dollars only", "amazing", "special offer", etc.

2. Fill the Ad time with some other sound

2.1 For some, silence is indeed perfectly acceptable.

2.2 Tell the player to play your own mp3 playlist during the commercials.

2.3 Tell the player to switch to another favorite radio (preferably one not being playing commercials at the same time.

2.4 If you accept a 60-second delay, the system will leverage the community signals and be able to stop ads from their very first second on.

3. Will the Ad companies get mad?

3.1 Well, take the great AdblockPlus example. It works really fine, and I asked its developper Wladimir Palant in 2008 or so he had got into troubles with Ad lobbies. He replied "No : if Firefox has 20% share and then 20% of Firefox users install Adblock, it makes only 4% of internet users... not enough yet to be a huge concern for them. I never received any kind of pressure attempt from them."

3.2 Dispite this, the Tivo VCR reached it to make US TV content providers pretty mad, because it allowed to skip Ads.

3.3 In the special case of computer-based radio listeners through the internet (only a small % of all radio listeners), I think the software would be able to achieve great reliability and popularity long before any content provider feels threatened : just like AdblockPlus.