Like to watch TV commercials?
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006If you don’t you won’t like this. Philips would like to force you to watch the TV adverts by stopping viewers from switching between channels. In their patent filing Philips say they will add a flag in the broadcast that TV’s and digital recorder would recognize and stop users skipping commercials.
Even though TV-channels and advertisers would love this technology I’m pretty sure that TV viewers would hate it twice as much. Everything that we are forced to do that we really don’t want to do would not be popular. Do they really think that I would pay money to skip the commercials? Why don’t go the other way around? Give viewers some credits when watching the commercials which could be used to watch pay per view programs from the same TV-channels. This would of course require some kind of secure technology so that smart viewers can’t get credits without actually watching the commercials.
Guess Philips would sell a lot of these TV’s as long as there are other brands without this technology, or NOT. Better run out and buy you a new TV before this catches on or maybe that’s exactly what Philips want you to do.
Source: New Scientist Tech