alt Hacker NewsThe Shazam app on my wife’s iPhone can identify TV shows and movies very quickly, sometimes nearly instantly. Not sure how it does that.
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I know a guy who made a Shazam-like phone app that can listen to a few seconds of noisy audio and make a fingerprint that can be used to quickly ID those specific few seconds out of a pre-fingerprinted archive of an enormous amount of audio (zillions of hours of TV). Making the fingerprint requires a tiny amount of very smart code (in C with no dependencies). But, the fingerprint is not useful for understanding audio that's not in the archive.
TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content
Signals analysis is pretty refined and not THAT compute intense.
It is pretty neat and several resources online explaining it but it chunks the recoding and does a hash of the fft of each frame i think which reduces the data a lot. The server has a pre hashed database https://hackernoon.com/how-shazam-works-in-a-nutshell