When your audience is your enemy, the game is already over

New Scientist and Adverlab note that Phillips has just been awarded a patent for a device that would prevent viewers from skipping channels during the ad breaks in live programmes or from fast-forwarding through them during recorded programming. The reasoning? That "the advertisements that are broadcast with the programs pay for the programs".

Quite apart from the fact that multi-tasking media consumers are perfectly able to read a book or chat online or play PSP or simply leave the room during these hypothetically "unskippable" breaks...the implication that broadcast networks will want to engage in this sort of outright war against their audiences defies the imagination. If anything can accelerate the end of broadcast media, the adoption of this approach by commercial TV networks is surely it.