Competitive Media Research - 

Monitoring TV Advertising

The monitoring of television commercial activity is of great importance to advertisers, advertising agencies, TV stations, and regulatory agencies. Competitive Media Research, a major supplier of these reports, recognized the high cost of its manual operation in which viewers watched tapes of daily broadcast activity and recorded the details of each commercial aired. The supplier embarked on a major project to automate the recognition of TV commercials through the use of sophisticated pattern recognition techniques. The successful result was a MicroVAX-based system that was deployed to 75 monitoring sites around the country.

However, these monitoring sites required central support which was to be provided by a large Tandem host used to prepare the activity reports. The Tandem host had to be able to read and write records in each of the VAX data bases.

Because of its multi-vendor experience, as well as its expertise in communications and database management, The Sombers Group was asked to implement an appropriate database connectivity capability. The function of each VAX remote site was to monitor one or more TV station signals and to convert suspected commercials to compact 128-byte "signatures." The digitized audio and video also were stored in an Audio/Visual (A/V) file. Each signature was then compared to a local Signature data base; if a reasonable match was found, the corresponding commercial was logged to the local Resolution file.

Signatures which could not be recognized were stored in the Segment of Interest file for resolution by the Tandem host which could use the VAX A/V data if required to present the commercial to a local workstation for manual resolution.

Sombers implemented a facility that allowed Tandem application processes to open, position, read, write, update, and close remote VAX RMS files as if they were local Tandem ENSCRIBE files. A library of database call procedures, bound into the Tandem application programs, passed remote I/O commands via a master communication process to a slave communication process on the VAX. This slave process included a set of remote procedure calls (RPCs) that executed the I/O requests on behalf of the Tandem application client.

The database connectivity facility also supported process-to-process communications. This allowed Tandem applications to send SQL requests to Oracle process mailboxes on the VAX.

These database connectivity tools were layered according to the OSI model so that they could use any communication channel existing between Tandem and VAX, such as asynchronous, X.25, or Ethernet channels. These tools later became the foundation for Sombers’ successful middleware product, NetWeave.