IBM Patent Could Insert Commercial Breaks Into Your DVD

First we had Disney and Universal give us un-skippable trailers/commercials before your DVD movie started. Not many people seem to know DVD is unprecedented in it's ability to control playback options on your player. Buttons and features on your DVD player can be changed or disabled by the disc you are playing and can result in things like virtually unskippable ads in front of your movie. Now a new technology from IBM would make it possible for the disc you rented/bought to pause during the movie for commercial breaks.
Wow. The main reasons I will not watch movies on TV is the butchering of the film from pan and scan and commercial breaks. I really don't like the idea of my player 'calling home' to determine how I purchased/rented the disc in order to decide what movie experience I am entitled to.
We tried this once before to an extent with the original DIVX and it was a miserable failure. At least with that format it was a relatively simple pay for play scheme, not an insidious way to insert additional advertising into your movie experience.
This is a great reason not to support either of the new HD formats since technology 'upgrades' like this are easy to integrate. HD-DVD and Blu-ray players need to be Ethernet connected for firmware updates and content interactivity. Arstechnica brings out it would be difficult (or impossible) to implement something like this on older DVD players, but not so hard on those nifty new HD formats.

read more | digg story