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Philips Patents Technology to Force Ad Viewing
An anonymous reader writes "According to New Scientist, Philips has filed a patent for technology to force viewers to watch the ads in a program. Basically they plan to add extra flags to the Multimedia Home Platform that would stop controls from working until the ads are finished." From the article: "Philips' patent acknowledges that this may be 'greatly resented by viewers' who could initially think their equipment has gone wrong. So it suggests the new system could throw up a warning on screen when it is enforcing advert viewing. The patent also suggests that the system could offer viewers the chance to pay a fee interactively to go back to skipping adverts."
A TV that won't let me turn it off when it catches fire sounds great !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Just start a lottery, where the winner gets to beat the piss out of the guy who thought of "forced advertisement".
A sure winner.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...if they patent this, then nobody *else* will do it, and than we can all just go and not buy Philips TVs.
My desire to buy a Philips product ever again in my lifetime just plummetted to zero. Nice work, marketing department!
Do something the victim hates and make them pay you to stop.
It's called "extortiom".
Oh sure, you won't resent it at all since you'll never buy it.
But what about the masses?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
that's it I'm going back to books.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Philips acknowledges that (etc, etc)
Well, duh. But not because I think my equipment is broken.. because the company that made it is clearly looking to get support from the people who stand to make money from all those (shiatty) commercials I'm forced to watch.
So Philips wants to make it easier for broadcasters to force me into watching ads for stuff I won't buy anyway, and then they've the audacity to attempt to chalk up their user's (inevitable) complaints to 'improperly working equipment'.So we need to watch more crap, and we're stupid to boot.
Har-de-har-har.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
"Philips' patent acknowledges that this may be 'greatly resented by viewers'" I don't think resented is a strong enough word. Maybe loathed, but even that, I don't think, is strong enough.
And I am not being facetious. I can't wait for them to start adding flags identifying commercials to TV signals. One day later I bet there is a plugging to MythTV that perfectly edits your recordings to be commercial free.
What with Digital TV lock-ins & broadcast flags I have no intention of ever buying mass market cable equipment again anyway. In the future all of my TV watching will be downloads anyway. This will just make it easier to get commercial free programming.
I hope people buy these TVs like hot cakes, cause I won't.
When I buy something, I buy it for one very simple purpose: to gain exclusive control over it.
If Philips wants to keep control over a TV or other device, that's fine. Give it to me, loan it to me, and I can accept that the owner keeps control over it - and I'm not the owner. But we have a technical term for selling property without turning over control, and that term is 'Fraud'.
When I sold my previous home, I surrendered control over it to the new owner. I no longer control how that house is used, who may come and go, and which TV shows may be watched in the living room.
It looks like Philips wants to pretend to sell me a device, while keeping control over it. That's not a sale, and presenting it as one is a clear case of fraud.
Which is why people like Sirius or iPods: commercial free. Hey, there's a concept that works! No ads + pay for content = happy customers + profit.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Well, the original intention of the un-skippable sections was the copyright notice; I can at least understand that.
Using it for ads and trailers is the abuse of the technology, and far more annoying than the 20-30 seconds of copyright notice, which I can live with. Being forced to watch trailers, ads, or anything else drives me insane.
I don't want forced product placement at the front of my movies any more than I'd be willing to accept 'must watch' ads in my TV. I skip over the Kotex and Huggies ads for a reason; no matter how hard they try, I'm not gonna watch American Idol or Survivor; and geriatric products don't interest me yet.
When will they learn that not all ads are relevant to all consumers? The sooner they understand that, unless they've paid me, they have no right to insist I actually watch their ads, the sooner we'll get along.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Kinda like The Matrix, only it was envisioned 2500 years ago. That, and Plato's _Republic_ doesn't have people floating in midair and doing cool ninja moves.
The patent also suggests that the system could offer viewers the chance to pay a fee interactively to go back to skipping adverts.
Pay a fee to go back to skipping adverts. I assume that this would be money paid to the content provider, who would in turn give a cut to all companies whose commercials were skipped. So the net result is that even though no commercial for Coca-Cola or what have you was seen, and no Coca-Cola product was used in the TV show, Coca-Cola still makes a profit off of the viewing of this show.
It's win-win for the corporation, and absurd for the consumer. If the corporation's ad gets seen, they get more money through traditional marketing routes. Now, in places where their ad DOESN'T get seen, they get money too. We are effectively unconditionally throwing money at megacorps.
My MythTV will be able to remove commercials much faster once there's a flag showing where the ads are.
- No ripping to a PC; excuse: piracy.
- No shooting of copyrighted objects with a camera; excuse: piracy.
- No open formats such as mp3; excuse: piracy.
- No skipping ads and copyright ads on DVD's or TV; excuse: piracy.
- Fetch your seearch history and habits from search engines; excuse: piracy/child porn/terrorism.
- Back door on cryptographic solutions for the government; excuse: piracy/child porn/terrorism.
- Storing your e-mail and traffic for later review by the authorities; excuse: piracy/child porn/terrorism.
We're looking for further excuses to install RFID chips under your skin, and electric zappers to control your actions, stay tuned.
You ask a very interesting question.
How does one award the content creators.
Remember, in a capitalist society, 'market forces' are meant to regulate the efficiency of the market.
If you restrict or charge too much for your product, the less people buy, and if you give it a away, your volumes are high but you make no money. Its the profit bell curve.
Previously, cost of duplication/distribution has been one of the main regultators in the content creation market. There is now a disruptive technology (the internet) that is taking away this previous 'stabiliser'. What we are seeing now is the free market, trying to recorrect its inefficiency (loss of profits). This will always cause pain. What suprises me, is the internet is huge opportunity to make squillions more money out of consumers (can you say back catalouges peoples!) though much increased volume and less cost per unit item.
This I think is where the RIAA etc have got it wrong. 99% of people want to do the right thing. 99% of western consumers do not steal from their local store. Even in Australia now, we have 'self checkouts'.
If the RIAA were run Kmart/Walmart, all the product would be behind glass locked cabinets.
Treat the consumer with respect, offer the product at a much more reasonable price, and people will generally do the right thing.
The problem I see, is that the RIAA etc, have played hardball for so long, the consumer has got quite adept at (and cultured themselves) to using P2P, AllofMP3 etc, making the battle to change that culture much harder than it needed to be.
46137
I let my wallet speak for me when it comes to this crap...
:) Bleh!
I won't buy a philips product if it enforces viewing of ads...
Or anyone else's product of like features...
This is why I DO NOT have Tivo and do NOT watch much TV.
Heck, Most of the time I still use my VCR to record any "MUST SEE TV" - (c)NBC And just FF through commercials... Unless it is one I WANT to see (heard from friends after souper bowle or some such reason.)
No, My computer is not an 8088 either, but yes, sometimes lowtech is the way...
oh, and of course there is the famous (Click) surf or (Click) off buttons.
If Phil & Co were smart they would make note of this... It's ashame that I already skip going to the movies because they force you to watch adds after purchasing a license to experience the content of the film in comfy seats with loud surround sound.
But then again, I don't think I've missed toooo many movies that were worth seeing anyways.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
There's a lot going on right now in television that resembles what happened on the Max Headroom television series. A dystopian future where the people who don't pay for education can't get it (even things as simple as the ABC's, but we're not there, YET), intellectual property controls, corporations the size of governments with the same amount of power, and even this patent by phillips was part of an episode.
There's a scene where an officer walks to a woman's apartment, pushes the off switch on the TV and exclaims, "An off switch! She'll get 20 years for that!".
Ah well, It's primetime and it's time for dancing poodles on TV. Gotta go.
Blank is beautiful!
What I resent most about Kubrick's changes is that he totally disregards Burgess attempt to warn about Communism. The future England presented in the novel is one where Soviet domination has succeeded by first appealing to youth. The novel A Clockwork Orange is a literary testament of the Cold War, the film is just a carnival of late 1960's fashion with lots of sex and violence for little ultimate purpose.
This is what I see happening:
- The companies that sell these devices leave out the part about them forcing you to watch commercials.
- A huge amount of people buy them.
- Less than a month later, customers get pissed off at the company and return the devices to wherever they bought them.
After loosing tons of money over this, the companies finally realise that they have to listen to consumers.
Of course, this would only happen in a perfect world. Something is bound to come up that will prevent people from receiving refunds or something of that matter.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Oddly, I kind of want them to get this patent.
;)
If Philips ties the idea of forcing ads on those of us with their equipment, it keeps everyone else from doing the same without licensing the technology.
Might as well enjoy the handful of accidental benefits of the borked patent system. . .
~EEE~
This idea goes exactly against what successful companies like Google and Overture are doing. This will totally turn off consumers to anyone who implements this. Good luck.
No Sigs!
Why bother hacking a TV when a DVB card can do it for you?
If they do broadcast a (don't skip the adds) flag I'd be surprised if the MythTV backend wasn't updated (within a few hours of the first boardcast) to strip that content from the video files as it records them. Or even better just pausing the record while the flag is present.
We have over 900 channels all largely showing the same crap and the same re-runs. I see little reason to even have a TV.
This will be yet another reason for people to (1) not buy the product and (2) find something that meets their needs - which may be a home grown product and (3) cancel their cable or satelite subscription as well.
Oh they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions - this isn't even a good intention.
I would acutally welcome such flags in programs. It will make it so much easier to detect and autoskip commercials in mythtv. Right now it is about 80% accurate in skipping commercials using the methods available. With actual flags in the broadcast this will be 100% effective. Very cool!
Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over.
So I'm surfing through channels, click, don't want that, click, nope, click, nope, click, nope, click ADVERTISEMENT and I'm stuck. I have to watch the add according to this until it's over and then i can go back to surfing to find out there's nothing on. Now THAT will suck.
-=JML=-
Of course, for a small fee you can avoid all of this.
Of course, for a fee, advertisers can override your preferences and show you the ad anyway.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Have you been to a movie lately? They run about 20 minutes or more of commercials before the movie. Not just the previews they used to run, actual damn commercials. To say nothing of the DON'T USER YOUR CELL PHONE bits.
Exactly. I buy a lot of DVD's but I also rip a lot of rentals too. Every time I learn of some bullshit scheme like this the numbers rise on the ripping side. As things stand right now I rip a lot of the ones I buy anyway to make "disposable copies" while protecting the originals.
When I rent a movie and rip it to make a keeper is it stealing? I guess so but I don't really care at this point. They hack away at my rights and in return I hack away at their profits.
Sure I'm not right but neither are they. They might be "legal" but that doesn't make them right.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
If I were the network I'd set the ad lockout bit occasionally during the real program for a few seconds, preferably at critical stages of the action. That'd prevent anyone using it for automatically stripping ads.
1. You cannot "file a patent." You file an application, and you that application can be anything you damn well please. You could file your local telephone book if you like. Tell Slashdot you filed your phone book as a patent application. It will be all over the headlines and you'll be famous for "patenting the phone book," although anyone with 22 seconds of experience working with the patent system would know that statement is unquestionably false.
2. The article itself links to "the full patent" which is unquestionably not a patent. There is literally no story here.
It's not like this is funny - an application for sex toys or resurrection machines. It's not like it's morally offensive - an application for a suicide machine. It's simply an application for a way to make some money. Sure, people might not like it, but any idiot who can force people to watch advertisements is a marketing genius. Whether or not it's fit to be patented is another story altogether, and one that won't be answered for years. The 371(c) date of that application is June 2005 - it probably won't even be glanced at by a patent examiner until 2007 or 2008.
This informative post was brought to you free of charge. Sorry for the interruption. If you scroll down (or up), you'll read the normal Slashdot non-sequitur deliberate ignorance that brings you back to this website time after time. I just wonder if anybody but myself gets tired of reading systematically false and erroneous "news" reports on Slashdot.
I think this ship sailed when corporations realized that the average consumer doesn't care what their software EULA says. You certainly don't own any software you've purchased, and the idea is starting to migrate to other things....
You should get modded up -- that's actually an interesting way of using the flags. If Philips has a patent on using the flags to force viewing of commercials, maybe somebody else will use the same flags to skip them? That wouldn't infringe on the patent, would it?
... but skipping commercials? Now that's a feature worth trolling through some shady businesses in Chinatown for. Why? Because it's something you can easily show off. You and your beer buddies are sitting around watching the game you TiVoed the day before; a commercial comes on and everyone groans...but with a sly wink you pick up the remote and--wham!--back to the game. That's a hell of a lot more impressive than "look, I can play imported anime!" or "I can play weird subtitled French porn!" to most people, I'll bet.
Of course, they'll probably only ever roll out such flags inside an end-to-end DRMed; a Roman orgy that makes HDMI look like a wet dream by comparison. You'd only be able to view the media on an approved platform, and the approved platform would then be forced to use Philips "no skipping" features. (I propose the system be given the brand name "MindRape(TM)" -- think that'll fly with the focus groups?)
I do think though that implementing a feature like this would push average consumers towards pirated or illegally flashed equipment faster than anything else. Let's face it, Joe Consumer doesn't give a shit about playing HD content on Linux and probably won't own one of the early HDTV sets without HDMI
Yes, it's sad when FF-ing through commercials is something that people will be able to get a slightly deviant thrill out of doing, like running a red light on a deserted street at night, but I think that's the future we're hurtling towards.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Actually a lot of DVD players do this now. They don't allow you to Fast Forward the FBI warning, some even goes as far to not allow you to hit menu or fast forward through ads on the dvd.
If it won't let you change the channel, what's to keep a person from power-cycling the set (with either the on/off switch or if that doesn't work, the plug)?
Personally I HATE it when people channel surf during the commercials... I always end up missing the first 30 seconds of the show after each commercial break
Just another crappy blog
How about my 12 gauge? Not like I'd be missing much.
That wouldn't help them really. You could still use the current methods of commercial detection. The flag would still signal you that a commercial is definitely coming up within the next few seconds or so, and greatly increase the hit/miss ratio of the algorithms.
Besides, technology that forces ad viewing can also be used to force the viewer to listen to long diatribes read from Atlas Shrugged.
"Of course, for a small fee you can avoid all of this."
Did anyone else read that and think about what idiots they are? Offering ad free versions for a fee completely undercuts their advertising market. Think about it. Who pays money not to watch ads: people who are willing to spend money for convenience. Who watches the ads instead: people who are willing to accept inconvenience in return for cheapness. Which group of people makes a better advertising market?
The people advertisers want to reach are the people who have disposable income and part with it easily. The exact people who do not see the ads in this scenario.
The other thing that they continue to miss is that studies show that people have better retention of commercials through which they fast forward. Why? Because they actually watch them to see when the show comes back! By contrast, people who leave the commercials play tend to ignore the TV during the commercials (talk to others in the room; get up for a snack or bathroom break; etc.).
Disabling fast forward during commercials is a stupid idea. The only result of this change would be a bunch of people with MythTV or a gray market commercial skipper getting perfect commercial skip.
On an individual basis (i.e., many corrupt individual/small groups), perhaps, but when it gets down to large-scale institutional corruption, I think we're playing with the big boys.
Petty Third World corrupt government officials only _dream_ of being able to slosh billions of dollars around to whoever they want, without fear of discovery because you made it legal through "legislation".
if you were smart enough, you would have patented this idea to prevent anyone else from doing some so utterly disrespectful of other people. The best part about patent submission, is that you just have to come up with idea and you don't have to actually make it. Seems like a good fit with
Any ideas for such patent submissions?
Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
That's fine, as long as Google remembers - I'm sure I can find them when I need their products.
So you are fine with people skipping commercials and if that is not possible they should get pirated content? Who pays for the content then? The bottom line is that commercials give you the ability to watch content for free. Without commercials you would ahve to have some mechanism for paying for each item of content, perhaps each second of content. Commercials also educate you on what is available in the marketplace, so they do ahve a purpose. The problem is irrelevant commercials or poorly made commercials.
That system makes pirated versions more popular if they have been ripped from DVD and had that nonsense removed.
Well said commodoresloat!
:P (>_<);;;
:(
Of course the antidote for commercial interests would be to simply put out non-annoying, conscise, informative, even entertaining ads like they did in the early days of TV (where it was mostly product placement within the sponsored shows).
Or make em all like minimovies like The legendary 1984 Apple Computer ad.
Now that's how to do an ad!
The only other ad in the same league would be the (in)famous Where's the Beef? ad for Wendy's with the late great Clara Peller in it.
By comparison, the new ad series for ask.com Googlelike search engine interface is just plain tiresome....
Had the producers juxtaposed the ad content/message with 2001 somehow properly, tastefully, and with the blessing of Stanley Kubrick's estate, they would have had an ad classic on their hands.
Oh well, missed opportunity.
All TV watchers aren't mindless sheeple....
Unfortunately, the advertisers are convinced that most of them are....
What free? Wanna see my cable bill every month? Wanna pay that for me?
Here's what they don't understand:
The marketers are paying the media company to advertise their product. They may choose to sponsor a specific TV show in the hopes that a lot of people are watching that particular show, and they'll get eyeballs during that show. Or they'll choose to get as much coverage as possible and get as much exposure as possible, and just be on as much as they can get.
But what TV shows stay on the air is (in some bizarre way) is decided like a stock market or a democracy -- if people don't watch your TV shows, your TV show goes off the air. If it's unpopular, it's probably relatively cheap to advertise in. If it's super popular, it probably costs a lot to advertise during (think Super Bowl or Seinfeld).
One group of people make content in the hopes that people will watch it. If it's popular, the TV can get eyeballs during that timeslot, which attracts advertising revenue for the TV companies since the advertisers think it's valuable for people to see their ads.
Note, that the advertising money doesn't go directly towards the production costs of the show. It may offset it (assuming it's the network who developed the show instead of someone who did it and shopped it around). If a network can get more money from advertising that producing/buying it cost, they make a profit, and hopefully make more TV.
Make no mistake, the advertisers are paying the media companies for the opportunity to market to a specific audience -- usually the shows demographic of desireable consumers. They have not purchased any obligation on my behalf, nor have they provided me with 'free' content.
If you look at some of the specialty channels, say, "The Food Network", you'll notice that higher end products are being pitched than in other contexts. This is because the demographic of who is watching that is a little better known, and includes people who are more likely to want certain products. But make no mistake, Charles Schwabb, Geiko, or whomever had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the production of any of the shows directly.
And just because they paid The Food Network for the opportunity to market to me, they have not paid me -- nor have they purchased any obligations from me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
and then someone tries to change channel in the middle of a program and can't.
"Hello, my set top box sometimes won't let me change channels, can you please fix it?"