But the cosy duopoly of advertiser and broadcaster looks set to the broken apart by new technology. The personal video recorder allows people to skip the ads altogether. Peter Bazalgette, the chief executive of Britain's Endemol production company (responsible for Big Brother, Changing Rooms, and a whole heap of other reality TV shows) believes it will only be a matter of time before the commercial break is a thing of the past. In an article in the London Independent newspaper ( http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/s... ), he describes how his children watch TV. "When they watch telly," he says, "they time-shift half of what they watch; they strip the ads when watching commercial shows and they hardly ever watch BBC1 or ITV. There are some fundamental shifts going on."
What are PVRs?
PVRs are beginning to make inroads in the United States and Britain. The first PVRs, were introduced under the brand names TiVo and ReplayTV, and were later joined by Microsoft's UltimateTV. They use the latest high quality, low memory use, MPEG video-encoding standards and today's modern hard disks to enable users to record at the same time as playing back, record two channels at once, and generally do all the things you wish your old VCR could do but can't.
Tech TV at http://www.techtv.com/products/consumere... has descriptions of the latest models. They use high technology in a person-friendly package to give the power back to the viewer. Viewers are able to pause the programme they are watching live if they are called away from the TV set. They can then resume watching where they left off while the PVR continues recording the programme until they catch up. They can whiz through a three minute commercial break in less than ten seconds. The networks must hate the idea.
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