So my son said to me this morning, just before heading to his swimming lesson, that he didn’t notice any commercials for Hoppers, this movie that he wants to see, and it’s already out of theatres.

That’s all he said.

Here’s what I heard: “Dad, wouldn’t it be cool if we could have an AI agent find all of the trailers and commercials that I would be interested in, and inject them automatically into the shows that I watch, instead of the commercials that are fed to me by the likes of YouTube?”

So I repeated back to him what I heard him say, and added “I’ll research it while you’re having your swimming lesson”.

During the course of his 45-minute lesson, I chatted with Claude about the possibilities, and landed on the following architecture:

  1. Install Jellyfin — an open-source alternative to Plex — and run it alongside Plex, because Plex doesn’t have any support for injecting commercials before shows. I can run it in parallel with Plex so it can be a soft transition.
  2. Install the Jellyfin app on Roku, and other devices that we watch our shows and movies on.
  3. Use a tool to auto-download new episodes of YouTube channels that the kids like to watch, and import them into Jellyfin.
  4. Write a desktop app that allows me to record my preferences for the types of commercials and trailers I want to watch, and have an agent (Claude) search through trailer sites and commercial sites (yes, these are a thing) for commercials we’re interested in, and download them to the Jellyfin server.
  5. Sit back and enjoy.

When he was finished his swimming lesson, I started to tell him the plan, as we walked back to the car. I was a few words past “Jelly fin”, and he said “I’ll pass”.

I responded, “but let me finish”, as we got into the car.

He said, “Daddy, all I said was that I didn’t notice any commercials for Hoppers, and you went off and designed this whole big thing”.

“Yes, but…”

He pressed the “Play” button on the audiobook we’re listening to (Project Hail Mary). And that was the end of that.