Apparently, Philips is getting into the business of building time machines…beautiful boxes that can transport us back to the days of television before the remote control.
CNET’s Candice Lombardi recently highlighted Philip’s new television that would force viewers to watch the commercials that go with the programming, or opt out of the commercials by paying a fee.
Ingenius…if it were the 1950s and they were competing with Zenith’s revolutionary “Lazy Bones” technology that would put the dial in the viewer’s hand.
While we already see plenty of such models working in the online space, I have a hard time believing that consumers will be pleased with this new technology. After experiencing an age of newfound freedoms, the industries are realizing that the revenues to create content have to come from somewhere. The only problem is, it’s pretty difficult to implement a system that would limit the consumer experience after they’ve had the whole enchilada for too long already.
If history tells us anything, cracks will be developed, people will find a way around the system and mediocre advertising will still go unnoticed. Or of course, people will just go buy any other TV on the market that doesn’t come with archaic technology or determines what you can and can’t do.
You can build a new bottle for the TV watching genie, but at the end of the day, the TV watching genie will decide whether or not to crawl on in.
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I heard TiVo was coming out with a way to still show you some kind of advertising overlay, while you are fast forwarding through the commercials of a recorded program.
I have both a TiVo and a PVR from the cable company, but I have no intention of buying TiVo's next model (I only still have the current one because I was dumb enough to buy the "lifetime of the box" service).
And here I thought we would go the other way -- I always found it amazing that you couldn't set the PVR or TiVo to stop recording when the commercial break starts, and resume when the commercials are over. It's not like the technology to put that signal in there doesn't exist; I just don't think many advertisers would stand for it.
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