Cheating the ad men

TV stations have started tweaking their adverts to fool the new breed of VCRs and PVRs that automatically skip ad breaks. Instead of running screen “transitions” such as dissolves or fades before the ads, which is what the recorders look for, the stations now transmit something less distinctive, so the recorders carry on recording. But Philips has spotted that in non-English-speaking countries most movies on TV have English dialogue and local language subtitles. In W0 02/093910, it says recorders could continually look for sequences where the subtitles stop appearing for a minute or so. This is logged as a likely…