How do streaming services determine the right time to show the “Skip Intro” and “Next Episode” buttons during an episode?

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How do streaming services determine the right time to show the “Skip Intro” and “Next Episode” buttons during an episode?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I assume it’s quite simple. They know the times, either by getting it from the studios or by quickly checking it. This is then saved and when the time comes the app you use pops up the buttons.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Since intros are usually the same across episodes, I’d assume that writing an algorithm to detect the timing wouldn’t be very difficult. Same with the next episodes.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A person probably puts them in. When they are adding a new show to the catalog, they can get intro and outro times, along with the subtitles and audio translations and x-ray/extras/commentary and what-have-you, and place the buttons accordingly. Building up those interfaces is a job that people do, just like there are people that build menus for DVDs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They are manually input into the meta data

Each episode is a specific video file, and that file has an associated text file, often an XML that has a lot of lines in it that tell the system what to do. Such as the date/time to make the content available, it’s length, the format(s), episode names/numbers, and such. Within this is also values for stuff like these you’re asking.

Not every streamer or service does it the same as absolutely nothing is uniform or standard in the steaming world, but it generally pretty simple like this with just an XML file with whatever info they need in there to fill in the blanks.

A person creates these files and values manually They literally will write a line like “start next episode: 28:74”. They figure out when the time to show this stuff is. Not automated.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Easieast way would be to add a line in subtitles.

When you put them on it usually has a [ Intro song] type of line. And subtitles always have timestamps.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Somebody manually adds markers as part of the set-up process to get the episode ready for uploading to the service, along with adding the episode and titles, adding the thumbnail image, adding categorization, other pieces of meta data, etc. that a file needs to be read by the streaming service.