And Now For a Word From Our Sponsor...

T.V. rules -
(pretty soon you won't be able to turn it off at all)
All you fools -
(then it'll turn you off - your back's against the wall)
In the -
T.V. Age

Joe Jackson, "T.V. Age" from Night and Day, 1982

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I remember the old days. We'd be watching TV, and then a commercial would come on. That was the cue to run the the bathroom, change the laundry, wash a couple of dishes, or tidy up a bit. To flip through the channels, we had to get up and, well, flip through the channels. There was a knob on the TV for this purpose, and we could change it all we wanted to and we never got carpal tunnel syndrome.

But then came the remote control and channel surfing. No need to get up, and no knobs to flip. The dishes piled up, the house was never cleaned up, and, well, I'm assuming that bathroom breaks fit in here somewhere but I don't remember for sure. And since we no longer needed to get up from the sofa, we started getting fat.

But now, Royal Philips Electronics has filed a patent application for a technology that could render our remote controls useless, at least at commercial time. This technology would allow broadcasters to freeze a channel during a commercial, so viewers wouldn't be able to avoid it. Which of course, wouldn't force us to watch the commercials (despite the title of the AP article reporting this "advance"). We could simply revert to the old days, getting up from the sofa, putting the dishes in the dishwasher, folding the laundry, and yes, visiting the bathroom, all the while melting those love handles from our waists with all the activity.

Philips suggested that consumers could avoid the activation of the feature if they paid a fee to program broadcasters. It also said it has no plans to use the technology in any of its products. Yeah, right.

Philips also said that the technology could allow a viewer to "choose, at the beginning of a movie, to either watch the movie without ads, or watch the movie with ads." Exactly what are they going to do to make us want to watch the movie with ads? Unless…the timing of the commercials can be customized, perhaps allowing us to synchronize the ads with something useful, like our need to use the toilet. Now that's a technology worth paying extra for!