On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 01:10:41 +0100 Pigeon wrote: > ... > The television regulating authorities ought to legislate that the PDC > code information should contain a flag to indicate whether the current > material being transmitted is programme content, advertising or > trailers. This could then be decoded by the receiving apparatus to > mute the sound and blank the screen during adverts.
This will *never* happen, I don't think. The whole purpose of broadcast television is to sell adds, all the rest that is broadcast is just to draw the viewers to the screen so they can see the ads. To do what you (and many others) suggest would effectively bring an end to broadcast TV (no financing). > The advertisers would hate it, but fsck 'em. The viewers hate the > adverts, and we're in the majority, by a long long way. Since the viewers of broadcast TV do not pay for it, but advertisers do, that majority is largely irrelevant. Irrelevant and harmless, since any actions of protest involving boycot, and thus giving up our favorite shows, will hardly get off the ground, and TV broadcasters are fully aware of that. This driving force behind television (the selling of adds) is so powerful that you can see more and more ads creeping up on viewer-financed TV distribution media such as cable, which you'd think would be a bit more under viewer control. So, the solution will have to be a spamassassin-like one. Smart receivers will have to analyse image/sound content as it's coming in, apply some heuristic criteria, and decide on that basis whether to block it on the fly. Even so, I doubt many equipment makers will take the trouble, since they would be fighting the industry that ultimately justifies their existence on the market. -- Carlos "Human-Nature-Fan" Sousa http://vbc.dyndns.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
