While I am posting, these are not my words, having come from the famous @schuyler who is caught up in meetings at the moment:
"I agree, badly placed ad breaks are incredibly frustrating. They can really take away from the enjoyment of the movie/show. We’ve always tried to do something to optimize the ad breaks. Sometimes we get suggested ad breaks from our content partners, which is great. Sometimes we’re able to rely on things like chapter markers. But sometimes we have nothing to go by and have to rely on inspecting the video to look for good breaks.
“And the good news is that we’ve recently been working on improving our algorithm in those cases, using some new signals to not only try to find the best possible ad break but also try harder to avoid the worst breaks (mid dialog). We’re currently testing the new approach on a narrow subset of our content, and the initial results have been really promising. So we hope this should get a lot better pretty soon, and it’s something we’ll always look to improve.”
