TV viewers with short attention spans might appreciate work in pr...
TV viewers with short attention spans might appreciate work in progress on receivers and recorders that will let them skip commercials or even parts of programs. Patent searches by Consumer Electronics Daily found a handful of such devices in…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
development -- although it’s presumed products won’t likely see the light of day due to commercial and political pressures. One patent filing (US 2004/0155986) by Japan’s Orion describes a TV that detects tell-tale signs of a commercial break and cuts to another program. The set has 2 tuners. One constantly receives a main choice channel while the other is set to receive a 2nd channel. As soon as a commercial interrupts the first program, the set switches to the alternate channel. When the commercial break on the first channel ends, the set automatically switches back. A Thomson patent application (US 2003/0115595) contemplates a different way to deal with commercials. It describes a TV with a built-in videogame which switches on when the set detects the start of a commercial. The viewer plays the game while the ad is in progress, and then the receiver switches back to live TV as the break ends. The TV freezes the game at the switch-over point and stores the score. At the next commercial break, the viewer can resume playing the game where it left off. Meanwhile, Philips is working on a way to improve PVRs that pause live TV by continually recording onto a hard drive. According to Philips’ patent filing (US 2004/0091249), the trouble with current PVRs is that if the viewer switches channels to avoid commercial breaks mid-movie, the hard drive either stops recording or records the disjointed channels hops. Philips’ solution is to use 2 tuners in a PVR, one of which keeps recording a main choice channel while the other lets the viewer zap through other channels during a commercial. If the viewer is slow getting back to the first channel after a commercial, that program will still be recorded to the hard drive intact for viewing. Mitsubishi is working on a system for time-shifters who record a long sports event, but want to watch only the highlights. Its patent application (US 2004/0167767) describes a video recorder programmed to detect the characteristic noise of crowd applause or booing. So when the viewer fast-forwards through a long recording, playback resumes whenever the crowd is perceived to be reacting to a key play or other event in the game. Mitsubishi is leveraging its research on MPEG-7 compression. Previous efforts elsewhere for similar systems have tried to analyze picture content, or used speech recognition software to detect key words from a sportscaster or other commentator.