DVD’s with unskippable commercials

Just when you thought DVD’s where the last place you’d see the lovable Geico lizard appear and talk you into buying their auto insurance, IBM comes out with a patent that might ruin (for some) the joy of watching a DVD without commercial interruption. With this new method of showing video ads, content publishers (movie studios, for example) could start offering ad-showing discs at a lower price.

The method is described like this:

When DVDs are inserted for playback, the disc would check to see if the viewer had purchased the ad-free version or the (presumably) lower-priced version with unskippable commercials. If it’s the latter, the disc player would phone home to an online service to download commercials or play ads embedded on the discs themselves.

Now, it would be impossible to use this method on current DVD players, but as described by Ars, they could potentially bring this technology to HD DVD’s.

[…] the HD DVD spec requires players to have an Ethernet port for online connectivity. While the connectivity is intended for things like software and firmware updates as well as interactive content, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used to download car commercials in 1080p.

While this might be a good idea for those who are budget-minded and wouldn’t mind a seeing couple of commercials (ads are everywhere anyways) to save a couple of bucks, lets just hope they don’t raise the price of commercial-free movies effectively implementing an ad-tax, where again, regular consumers get screwed.

Read [Ars Technica]