The tech powering the Political TV Ad Archive

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Ever wonder how we built the Political TV Ad Archive? This post explains what happens back stage — how we are using advanced technology to generate the counts for how many times a particular ad has aired on television, where, and when, in markets that we track.

There are three pieces to the Political TV Ad Archive:

The Internet Archive collects, prepares, and serves the TV content in markets where we have feeds. Collection of TV is part of a much larger effort to meet the organization’s mission of providing “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”The Internet Archive is the online home to millions of free books, movies, software, music, images, web pages and more.
The Duplitron 5000 is our whimsical name for an open source system responsible telemarketing data for taking video and creating unique, compressed versions of the audio tracks. These are known as audio fingerprints. We create an audio fingerprint for each political ad that we discover, which we then match against our incoming stream of broadcast television to find each new copy, or airing, of that ad. These results are reported back to the Internet Archive.
The Political TV Ad Archive is a WordPress site that presents our data and our videos and presents it to the rest of the world. On this website, for the sake of posterity, we also archive copies of political ads that may be airing in markets we don’t track, or exclusively on social media. But for the ads that show up in areas where we’re collecting TV, we are able to present the added information about airings.


Step 1: recording television
We have a whole bunch of hardware spread around the country to record television. That content is then pieced together to form the programs that get stored on the Internet Archive’s servers. We have a few ways to collect TV content. In some cases, such as the San Francisco market, we own and manage the hardware that records local cable. In other cases, such as markets in Ohio and Iowa, the content is provided to us by third party services.

Regardless of how we get the data, the pipeline takes it to the same place. We record in minute-long chunks of video and stitch them together into programs based on what we know about the station’s schedule. This results in video segments of anywhere from 30 minutes to 12 hours. Those programs are then turned into a variety of file formats for archival purposes.

The ad counts we publish are based on actual airings, as opposed to reported airings. This means that we are not estimating counts by analyzing Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports on spending by campaigns. Nor are we digitizing reports filed by broadcasting stations with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about political ads, though that is a worthy goal. Instead we generate counts by looking at what actually has been broadcast to the public.

Because we are working from the source, we know we aren’t being misled. On the flip side, this means that we can only report counts for the channels we actively track and record. In the first phase of our project, we tracked more than 20 markets in 11 key primary states (details here.) We’re now in the process of planning which markets we’ll track for the general elections. Our main constraint is simple: money. Capturing TV comes at a cost.