Slashdot Mirror
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' 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.
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...
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!
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=-
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.
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."
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".