Aussie inventor plans to ICE television advertising

Your set-top box may soon be able to remove advertising for you -- for a price.

Australian inventor Peter Vogel (most notably famous for the Fairlight Music Synthesizer) today showed off his latest enterprise in Sydney. Dubbed ICE ("Intelligent Content Engine"), the service will be offered in digital TV set top boxes and PVRs from November this year. The ICE service offers a number of enhanced TV features, including an electronic program guide, parental control functionality built around program ratings classifications and a number of different modes designed to skip or eliminate standard television advertising. There is a catch, though -- you'll have to pay a subscription fee to recieve ICE's wireless transmissions which control all of these features. Vogel stated that the fees should range from AU$2-$3 dollars per week, depending on the functionality desired.

Vogel showed off the majority of the ICE service's functionality at an event in Sydney this morning, including the ability to control the volume level of advertisements (dubbed "ICE Hush") automatically, or to skip over to another channel (or, in the example shown, a digital radio station) for the duration of an ad break ("ICE Surf"), or to simply blank the screen out when ads are playing. He also showed the parental control feature of ICE ("ICE Nanny") which works by limiting viewing choices depending on which ratings are shown to be suitable.

While Vogel didn't reveal much of the technical detail behind how the ICE system works, he did state that it was backed up by live monitoring -- so presumably he'll be looking to hire people to watch solitary TV stations 24/7 -- to enable the system to react automatically to ad changes, or late running TV programs. The service only works with free-to-air Digital Television broadcasts, and Vogel stated that they have no plans at the current time to extend this to Foxtel's Digital TV service. It's expected that the first ICE-enabled set top boxes will go on the market in November, subject to the company raising the necessary AU$6 million in capital required. The company commercialising the technology, Faulconbridge, had already received around AU$1 million in funding through the government's BITS initiative. The service will initially operate in the Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong areas, with plans to move it to a national service within the following 18 months. More detail can be found on the ICE TV Web site.