Mediaboss Marketing

If Google follows through on one of its latest approved patents, Alex might finally stop spoiling every damned TV series he watches.

If you feel like youcan barely wade through social media siteswithout stepping into a spoiler-filled land mine, you're not alone. Google wants to ease the pain of anybodywho checks friends' feeds before getting home to watchDVR'd episodes of shows like Better Call Saul and Game of Thronesas evidenced by a filing approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday for Google's "processing content spoilers" system.

The patent listing, discovered by tech-biz outlet Quartz, describes a system that requires input from the person who doesn't want content spoiled. That input can include the user's own answers about how far they've gotten in a TV or book series, or it can include imported statistics from a third-party video service like Netflixincluding, for example, how many episodes of a series you've watched or whether a film was paused before it ended.

With that data in hand, the respective social network could then automatically flag any content that might pop up on a spoiler-sensitive user's feed. That content would be obscured by default, requiring a click-through of a "possible spoiler" warning before it appeared in full.

Google's patent also suggested using such data to build fan pages for the TV or book series in question and made no bones about the peer pressure the pages'"progress" meterswould foster: "[This] may give each member social pressure to read the book according to the schedule and may encourage the members to keep up without waiting for the last minute to skim through the book."

The patentsaid nothing aboutlive-TV safeguards by default; essentially, users who wanted to avoid sports scores or award show winner lists would need to proactively update their "don't spoil me" lists, as opposed to this system actively scouring a user's interests and deeper metadata to determine what might count as an offensive spoiler. The patent also didn'tmention any spoiler safeguards about falling asleep while your favorite streaming services continue to playnor did it mention the fact that spoilers posted on Google Plus might never be noticed.

When asked whether Google users should expect to see this system in any of its products, a Google spokesperson told Ars that "prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from ourpatents."

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Google sends love to DVRs, patents automated spoiler-warning system