New Type Of TV, BUT Will They .......

Great Debates
1

I KNEW WE HAD THE TECHNOLOGY!

I should have patented or copywritten the idea when I thought it up a couple of years back!

I was thinking about making a television which would receive the data stream from the cable into something like a computer and from there, send it to the screen. MY idea was that the owner could then program out all of those annoying commercials, because, since they are added to a movie by the station, their signal is not the same as the movie itself. He could turn on the TV, say 30 minutes after a program has begun, draw it up from memory and watch it commercial free!

Well, with the new digital television plus the iron control cable companies have gotten, plus the fact that advertisements have gone from 60 seconds in the 60s to 2 minutes in the 70s to 5 minutes in the 90s, it was pointed out to me that such technology would never be allowed.

It might not be, but now there is a television on the market by Phillips which records movies digitally in memory, and gives one up to 30 minutes playing time, plus slow motion, reverse and stuff, including pause. No tape, no disk. All memory. SO the COMPUTER is in there!

Now, we need some bright boy hacker to stop being a pain in the ass on the Internet to whip up a little circuit board which can be fitted into the new system, designed to wipe out any incoming commercials. All it would need to do is stop the data stream when the signal changes, then resume recording the movie when it starts up again! No doubt, as time goes on, the new TV will have greater and greater recording time and probably start recording it to save on something like a CD sized video disk. (I heard that VCR tapes are becoming obsolete! Took them long enough! I had figured they’d go the way of 8 tracks 10 years ago! The friggin tape wears out too fast and is too prone to damage. PLUS I can always tell a home video taped movie from a normal one because it BLURS slightly.)

So, think some bright boy will figure out a way to stop the annoying commercials?

I hope so! If I have to watch that SKINNY chick tell me about bank loans again, with arms so thin that I can wrap my thumb and forefinger around them I’ll explode! Or that one chick who sells cars and has this BIG set of boobs but one of the skinniest bodies I’ve ever seen, drawn cheeks, shrill voice and stands next to this goofy looking salesman in a striped shirt with suspenders.

I don’t want to be reading and watching TV and suddenly hear this phone ring, a guy answer and this older woman gets on with this concerned voice to tell him how someone they knew died and left his wife without insurance. PLUS, it would be real damn nice to eat my evening meal without some lady getting on to demonstrate how some pad absorbs blood better than the others and CUTS it in half to show me the jell or to discuss feminine itching, or to see some guy sticking out his grundgy foot and grumbling about foot odor while the next ad goes into details about hemmroidal itching! I prefer NOT to find out about sprays for female aroma either when I’m trying to eat spaghetti.

Not good for the digestion!

Have you noticed how there cannot be even 1 commercial break without some car commercial!?

You can write in and bitch, complain, gripe and protest all you want to the stations, but they ignore you because they know you have to watch what they give you. Like, WHO likes that split screen that pops up now on some channels after a movie? Sometimes I like to listen to the closing songs, or check to see what actor played a certain part, but nooooo! Now some stations split the screen, shrinking everything down to microscopic, and loudly advertise what is coming on next, the weather and sports highlights while I’m trying to hear the end of that cool closing song!

Think someone will either manage to get a commercial stopping device in the new televisions or develope one and sell it on the side? (Kinda like those illegal cable boxes.)

Hey! How long before your cable television, internet and phone all come into your home over the phone line?

2

The problem is not detecting and removing the commercials. You can do that with a 30 second forward skip. The problem is storing all the video data.

Now that the price for truly massive amounts of fast storage is coming down, there will most certainly be products especially designed to allow you to skip commercials.

Me, I like commercials. That’s when I post! :wink:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. - Phillip K. Dick

3

You guys are behind the times. There are two hard-disk recording machines on the market called the Tivo and the Replay, that run constantly and record something like 12-30 hours of video. If you’re watching a TV show, you can hit pause just like it was a tape if you need to go to the bathroom or take a phone call. When you hit play again, the show will start back up again where you left off. When you hit a commercial, just fast-forward 30 seconds and it’s gone.

When shows come on that you would never watch, just hit the reject button, and that show will be skipped from recording to save memory. Very cool devices.

However, I wouldn’t be too sanguine about removing commercials if I were you. I don’t like them either, but I think I’d like paying a couple hundred bucks a month for TV even less. The studios have to make money somehow. Some of these popular TV shows cost $1 million an episode or more. If the network can’t make money from advertising, they’re going to charge YOU.

If these machines become very widespread, the ad companies will find out through surveys that the number of people who view their ads has dropped way down, and the market price of that ad space will go down. the end result will be cheaper shows, user-fees, or no shows at all.

4

Yes.

And no shows at all might be just the thing for someone who can’t generate the class to turn off the TV during dinner. :smiley:

5

HEY! I’m a normal American guy, single with no kids so I enjoy eating my meals when alone, in front of the television. I think you’d be surprised just how many families watch television while they eat.

I haven’t heard of those recording devices yet – just VCRs and VDR. What I mean is that they’ll probably come up with a television which will record the programs into memory first or onto a CD sized disk – at your choosing. The one out now records 30 minutes into memory apparently automatically, on whatever channel you are watching, as you watch it. It replays instantly whenever you activate any of the special features, I think.

6

People have been muting commercials for years, and we still have good broadcast TV. I’m not worried about it. What I think we’ll see as more “zapping” technologies develop is that ads will become more interesting, and people will want to see them. Heck, I watched the Super Bowl this year just for the commercials!

7

I’m working for a company called GeoCast, and the system we’re making will … well … let’s just say watching broadcasts as they come down the pipe may well become a thing of the past.

And the commercials won’t be insterted “into” the middle of the video stream, either…

8

COOL!! Whatever it is, I want one now!

I find most commercials irritating as heck and while I certainly have control of the mute button on my remote, it is still annoying when they interrupt a good show for 5 minutes. Especially since around here, many businesses have gone to making their own commercials and they look like something out of a comedy where they show bad commercials on TV.

Plus, the current trend in most computer related commercials is to make them as dark and gloomy looking with strange backgrounds as possible, which I find depressing. I also get real tired of car commercials, having long ago come to the conclusion that most of their advertisements are BS.