It was earlier revealed that Philips has patented a technology that would make it impossible for TV viewers to change channel during the commercials or fastforward past commercials in recorded TV broadcasts. This was not received well by the community and many raged against Philips threatening with boycott and similar actions. Philips has now answered to the critcism and said that it never intended to use the technology to prohibit the viewer to change the channel. Instead it would be used so that viewers could choose whether they wanted to see the movie with or without the commercials, where the latter would be for small cost though.
“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.”
It claimed that it has no plans for actually using the technology. It just wanted to develop the technology and patent it as a part of the broader development of the industry. A typical PR answer, but if it will actually not use the technology viewers can relax a little, but we still know that the technology is out there.
Source: Yahoo!
