Month: July 2006

AdJab reports today:

ABC wants to kill DVR ad-skipping
ABC executives have held discussions with the people providing consumers with DVRs about a potential future feature for the devices that would disable the ad-skipping.

This reminds me of an amusing part of Israel’s history, and as unbelievable as it sounds – it is a true story…

In the 70’s the only TV station in Israel started broadcasting a handful of programs in color. Very few people would benefit from this because color TV sets were not very affordable at the time. This led to an outcry of people complaining that it was unfair that some people can see programs in color while most others couldn’t.

And that led to a wonderful government law commissioning a cutting edge technology, available exclusively in Israel at the time, called the ‘Mehikon’ (variation on ‘eraser’ in Hebrew). The law required that every new color TV set imported to Israel be installed with a special electronic board (the ‘Mehikon’) that ‘erases’ the color from programs that happen to be broadcast in color(!!) So even if you got yourself a nice shiny new color TV set, it was crippled by law back into a black & white only box.

Of course it took very little time for a bunch of Israeli entrepreneurs to develop the ‘Anti Mehikon’ – another electronic board that was added into those color-turned-into-b&w TV’s which bypassed the circuitry of the Mehikon and got back the color to the TV set.

I know this story seems like a piece of particularly wild science fiction, and I hope that in 30 (hopefully less) years initiatives such as the one ABC is cooking will seem just as unbelievable.

However, if they do make this happen and cripple DVR’s to prevent ad skipping, I predict a red hot market for ‘Anti-Dilugon’ (Hebrew for ‘Anti-skipping’) chips which will de-cripple the DVRs back to what they should be.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” –Mark Twain.