I’d like to be able to block the pop-up ads the networks use that (usually) promote an impending program, while the program I’m watching is running. Some of these are terribly intrusive.
I’d also like to pull the TV picture down - i.e., expand it - to cover the crawl as needed, and to eliminate those multitudinous tabs ( e.g., “BREAKING NEWS” etc) at the bottom of the screen that often block out the focus of what’s being presented on screen.
Those are generated from the networks, not the cable provider. Complain to the networks.
And that seems more like a function of your TV set, not the cable broadcast.
I’m sure it could be done, but you’d really have to know what you’re doing. Take care not to electrocute yourself.
The popups are in the video stream you’re receiving in your house - there’s no metadata to identify that they’re occurring, and the parts of the scene they cover are irretrievably gone.
The second would require you to hack your TV, and again, those scrolls are already in the video you receive in your house, so they’re not easily identifiable. I guess you could make it a control on your remote, but it would require some serious rework of your TV.
Don’t see any legal issues with either of these, as long as you don’t rebroadcast the signal, but the technical issues seem formidable.
No kidding!!! This is a thunderous revelation!!! I’ll bet you could get a top flight job as an investigative reporter for Fox News!!
I’ll be sure to follow your advice. And I’m absolutely confident they’ll act upon my complaint.
Thank you so much for your fabulous insight.
You asked for advice, and it was given. Why the sarcasm?
You were asking what you could do with your cable TV to make them go away. I’m telling you the bugs do not originate from your cable box, but from the networks.
No need for sarcasm.
How about some black electrical tape?
You’re right, ivylass, and I apologize.
In my defense, though, it’s a given that the bugs come from the networks. But to get to those bugs, I’d have to first hack the Cable Box.
I wish there were software we could somehow download to fix the intrusions.
In theory, you could develop software which could differentiate between a bug and the program video and blank it out. Two major problems exist with this, however. The first, and foremost, is that AI technology is nowhere near the point of having this capacity. Second, the bugs are generally opaque, and any picture data behind them has been lost. The best you could do is have the software guess at what was there in an attempt to make the now-empty space not as intrusive.
So, it’s just about impossible. Guess I’ll just go back to my crystal set. 
Okay, I just want to clarify, here, but are you under the impression that the video signal and the bug are sent separately, and mixed at your cable box?
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems highly unlikely. Especially because I get my cable straight out of the wall, sans box, and I get bugs.
No, you’d have to hack into the networks’ computers. Hacking into the box does nothing for you.
About all you can do at home would be to mess with your TV’s vertical size to stretch the picture to the point that the “lower thirds” are simply pushed out of view.
It’s probably more effective to write letters to the networks and to the major advertisers of the affected programs. Maybe if enough people complain, they’ll stop the things. I think we’d have a higher chance of going back to black and white before this happens, though.
Right, as **Q.E.D. ** said, the video feed that comes out of the cable channel’s sourcealready IS of the whole screen with the crawls and panels as one raster scan. Your cable box hack would just create blank space.
This is why if I ever am producer of a giant mega-blockbuster hit movie, I am SO making it a requirement of selling the TV rights that they run NOTHING as a crawl or bug over my content, and that the credit scroll is shown full size at normal speed…
…OK, so that would require me to produce this generation’s equivalent to Star Wars, but hey, a boy can dream…
Bottom line is, they’re not going to go away anytime soon.
With DVDs, VCRs, and TiVo, viewers are zipping past breaks. This is also where networks promote upcoming shows. Since viewers are zipping past them, networks and advertisers are inserting information during the show, so they can get to you that way (product placement, bugs.)
I agree, some of them are intrusive. TNT had a horrible one for baseball with sound, that covered up the audio of the show. I notice they haven’t done that lately.
Now, if you will be a good boy and watch the commercials as well as the promos without fast-forwarding through them, maybe the bugs will go away.
Yeah, this can’t really be done automatically, or on-the-fly.
However, if you capture the video to your computer and run it through a program, specifying exactly where on the screen and for how long the pop-up occurs, you can have the computer guess, based on the surrounding colors, what was originally there. It tends to not be too bad at making those guesses, but what you end up with is a moving blur that’s far more distracting than the pop-up, IMHO.
Okay.