Philips has submitted a new patent that could make the company the most hated by TV viewers (of all time?). Philips has been working on a way to force TV viewers to watch the commercials, something that would dramatically improve the advertising revenues for the TV channels. Philips’ idea is simply to lock the channel when the commercial starts. It has plans to use Multimedia Home Platform, that send out “flags” to send out information to the units that broadcast the channel. Philips suggest that you use these flags to stop the user from changing the channel when the commerical starts and does so until it is over. The flags will also work with digital videos making any fastforwarding impossible.
Philips is aware of that this “might” anger and confuse the viewers and suggests that a warning message is displayed at the start while you get the possibility to pay a small fee to skip the commercial.
Would Philips make this real and actually use this patent it will literally make every viewer in the world furious. Those who are browsing the channels and end up in a commerical, are they locked in then? So far there is just a patent submission, but it may very well be the future.
Source: New Scientist
