Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

@boobs_idiot@octodon.social I've been wondering this too

@madewokherd that does seem to be what they're claiming, yeah

@Nine the podcast is played via a downloaded mp3 file. As I discovered after some research: the ad is spliced into the file as it's being downloaded, and the ads are chosen based on Algorithms™

@quirk I thought Stitcher only does it through their platform? (as in you have to use a stitcher streaming app to access a podcast)?

This inserts ads into mp3s that are downloaded onto people's devices, regardless of what app they use.

@madewokherd oh sure, I'm not saying it's super complex

(although that approach also would cause problems - if the files have different id3 tags, then mp3 players might not display things consistently)

The thing they're claiming to invent is the *dynamic* advertising part, where it figures out what ad to insert based on region, time of day, and other collected information about users.

@madewokherd it has headers for each frame, so it looks like this:

header data header data header data header data ....

if your ad is a single frame, you can insert it in as a (header data) set just before another header.

But if you try and insert it in the middle of a data section, then you get problems, because you'll have:

header data header da [header data] ta header data

Then the sync points don't match up, and you get errors in playback

@Jo my podcatcher is perfectly happy downloading from there, maybe you should double check

@Jo this is a BBC sounds podcast called "Murmurs"

@madewokherd (also it's a little more complex than cat, because you need to tweak the header as well, otherwise playback can malfunction)