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Who you gonna call? Ad-busters

There's been a quiet revolution in Peter Vogel's living room. Whenever ads appear on his television the volume drops, the screen goes blank or the set switches channels.

It's not a technical fault. He has developed a way to dull, mute or delete noisy ads.

"It's had a dramatic effect on our household dynamic," said the 49-year-old Blue Mountains inventor who already uses his Intelligent Content Engine (ICE) system when watching television with his daughters.

"Previously the kids would sit glued to the screen from beginning to end. Now when the commercials come on the volume drops and they talk to each other. The ads don't dominate."

As well, if children are barred from watching anything above PG, for example, it will detect and blank out MA-rated shows.

"There's even the potential to develop specialist ratings. A Christian rating, in theory, would stop kids watching programs deemed blasphemous, and a quality rating would filter programs according to their quality as assessed by a panel of experts."

Mr Vogel is confident ICE technology will soon be added to many of the inexpensive set-top boxes that allow analog television sets to receive digital signals. His company would charge about $2 a week for the service.

Ad-free viewing sounds like the industry's worst nightmare. Commercial Television Australia said its spokeswoman was unavailable yesterday and executives at all three commercial networks did not return calls.

Steve Allen, head of the media planning company Fusion Strategy, said the system could have serious repercussions. "If this technology is efficient, effective and economical it would be a major setback for advertisers and television networks."

ICE is based around a central computer that analyses broadcasts in real time and sends data on all programs to ICE-equipped televisions through a private digital radio network.

Mr Vogel said it cannot be sabotaged and he has legal advice that it does not break any laws. "Basically we're just automating what people are already doing. I think the networks . . . know this is inevitable."

Posted by thinkum at June 10, 2004 02:30 PM