Blahahaha! Yeah sure, I'm going to run out today and buy a device that forces me to watch commericals.
The only way to force me to watch commercials, now that I have a TiVo, is to tie me up.
Posted on 04/20/2006 6:26:51 AM PDT by Xenophobic Alien
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In this era of easy ad skipping with TiVo-like video recorders, could television viewers one day be forced to watch commercials with a system that prevents channel switching?
Yes, according to Royal Philips Electronics. A patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office said researchers of the Netherland-based consumer electronics company have created a technology that could let broadcasters freeze a channel during a commercial, so viewers wouldn't be able to avoid it.
The pending patent, published on March 30, said the feature would be implemented on a program-by-program basis. Devices that could carry the technology would be a television or a set-top-box.
Philips acknowledged, however, that the anti-channel changing technology might not sit well with consumers and suggested in its patent filing that consumers be allowed to avoid the feature if they paid broadcasters a fee.
On Wednesday, company officials issued a statement that noted the technology also enables the opposite: allowing viewers to watch television without advertising. The intention was never to force viewers to watch ads against their will, the company said of the technology.
"We developed a system where the viewer can choose, at the beginning of a movie, to either watch the movie without ads, or watch the movie with ads," the company stated. "It is up to the viewer to take this decision, and up to the broadcaster to offer the various services."
The company also said it had no plans to use the technology in any of its products.
Philips wanted to provide the technology and seek the patent only as part of the broader developments within the industry, Philips spokesman Andre Manning said.
Don't you mean Anthony Burgess? He wrote the book that described the scene which Kubrick shot.
Sounds like another variation on the the old protection racket, no broken windows in my house.
My cable bill is $127.00 month.
Hey, I need to ask my cable company to add that one.
If my tv wouldn't let me switch channels during a commercial, I wouldn't pay an extra fee. I'd stop watching television completely. I can get my news off the internet.
Already have been corrected once :-) see post #70
One can always hope...
I loved Monk, but I simply can not stand the blonde Sharona replacement, so I stopped watching. *Sigh*
HOw about advertisers choose which show they want to SPONSOR...instead of these nationwide "buys," where advertisers sometimes don't know which shows their commercials show up on, have them sponsor entire shows and get to air one two minute commercial before the show starts and one in the middle. This way, corporations have better control over what shows their name is attached to, and viewers won't have as many commercials. We'd have a lot less dreck on TV, that I can guarantee. It's a win-win.
I think we are going to start going to an a la carte system, where you can on-demand select the shows you want to watch for a fee.
I really don't think that would work.
$127 a month for Cable? Forget that, I buy houses for less than that out of pocket.
What happened to "choice"? where's the "pro-choice" crowd now. Bet the OFF swt. still works. And the "pull the plug outta the outlet."
And that's the subject of their next patent.
< ]B^)
"technology that could let broadcasters freeze a channel during a commercial, so viewers wouldn't be able to avoid it."
Fine, I won't watch tv. F'em!
Remember when they first sold us the idea of Cable Television?
Because there are no commercials we have to charge you a monthly fee.
No way this flies unless we "roll over one more time"(Web Hubell quote)
A small technical digression, if you will.
Jenkins and other mechanical TV inventors had systems that could produce about 30 lines (today we'd say 30 by 30 pixels) at around 10 frames per second. At those data rates (in the analog domain, of course) it translated into a bandwidth of a few kilocycles (Hz weren't invented yet <];^).
The good news: These primitive TV signals could fit into any audio technology: phone lines, mechanical records, and ordinary AM broadcast stations. All the early broadcasters of these signals did so on AM broadcasting channels with ordinary transmitters.
The bad news: The more clear-headed of the inventors, and I think Jenkins was one, knew that the system would have to tremendously improve its image quality before the public would accept it.
Two problems with scaling it up: First, they were tearing their hair out trying to do it; ultimately, they failed because the mechanical technology presented pretty much of a brick wall to significant technical improvement.
Second, they would necessarily give up all that cheap, easy-to-come-by storage and transmission. Because instead of a few measly kilocycles, they were going to need systems that could handle at least a megacycle, or five, for a video signal.
The electronic system proponents realized all this, and embarked on an expensive R&D program to make electronic TV work, with new and difficult technology at every point of the chain from the live image to the one in the user's eyeball. (The expense of the project at RCA gave Sarnoff considerable heartburn.)
So you had two competing systems developing: One, with near-immediate payoff but fundamental limits that would keep it from ever becoming a great commercial success, and the other that required a long and ruinously expensive R&D cycle but whose performance promised a chance of universal acceptance; a promise that was ultimately fulfilled.
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