Recently, a U.S. patent application by Philips was published. Philips seeks a patent for an "apparatus and method for preventing switching from a channel during an advertisement display". Basically, it is a system that could be included in the Multimedia Home Platform and would detect a special flag which would be broadcast during TV commercials. Upon detection of the flag, the system would prevent viewers from zapping to other channels unless the pay some fee. Two things are interesting. First, there is, of course, the policy question whether it is good thing to build force TV viewers by code to view commercials. Second, it would be interesting to speculate how much a viewer would have to pay to skip the commercial. What is the personal utility of not viewing a commercial?
A new kind of broadcast flag?
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