http://new.www.murdoch.edu.au/About-Murdoch_old/Murdoch-discoverers/Professor-Duane-Varan/
In the first paragraph of the above link this line stood out for me "And wouldn’t it be great if you could forever ban that annoying TV commercial from your screen?".
This is regarding interactive television, and I think it's an interesting idea, although I can see a few problems with it in such a primitive form. If people were able to ban a specific ad I imagine they would just start spamming this function during commercials, until eventually they saw very few to no advertisements. And when the occasional new ad would pop up they might get angry or feel wronged that they're being made to hit that ban button again and again. Effectively making the user hate the products they're having to deal with on their screens.
Now I think (or at least I hope) that the research team is clever enough to be thinking about these sorts of problems and coming up with solutions. Something I would suggest is perhaps putting a limit on the amount of ads you can ban and/or having the ad play all the way through once you've hit ban so that it isn't a "skip" function.
There are a great deal of benefits from this system too however, like being able to judge what individual users like and targeting the right sort of ads at them. An issue that comes up here would be what if multiple users are using the same television? How do you differ between them? Optimally this should be something that the user doesn't have to put any effort into at all, but that's tricky. The first idea that comes to mind is a Log In system, maybe it could connect to their facebook and give them notifications and show their friends what they're watching? This still requires a bit of user input however, and signing in and out between say family members would be a bit of an inconvenience. Another idea, though it would require higher tech, is putting a device in the remote control that recognizes the users hand, or alternatively, have multiple colour ban buttons on the remote that the users can assign, everyone who uses the television would have their own button on the remote to press to ban an ad and when they use it the television would automatically know who's watching and configure itself accordingly. Or! Remove the remote entirely and have voice command, the system could identify the voice and say "okay so this is sally and she doesn't like ads with puppies and trampolines." etc. The remote could remain optionally though for people with vocal disabilities.
Another thought would be to change the way ads are received in the commercial break. Instead of rolling them our one after the other, a selection screen with categories on one side of the screen, and an ad viewer on the right side. In the ad viewer there would always be an ad playing, but the user can select categories from the list on the left that they like best and then they'll get ads that are more suitable for them. There would also be a button to make the ad viewer full screen once the user is comfortable that they've selected everything they like.
I've accidentally gone and written a wall of text of ideas that sprouted from that one sentence "And wouldn’t it be great if you could forever ban that annoying TV commercial from your screen?". I had intended to write about the whole article but I think I'll stop now and I may come back to this article in a future post and see if I can draw inspiration from it again.
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