Digital Home Thoughts: ABC Wants to Disable Your Fast Forward Button

"Mike Shaw, ABC's President of Advertising Sales, said this week that he would love to have the opportunity to shut down the "fast forward" button on users' DVRs. Though he did not claim that commercial-skipping TiVo owners were thieves, Shaw is clearly unhappy with how easy it is to skip his network's ads. From the network's perspective, this is probably the best way to neutralize ad-skipping, which has taken its toll on network ad revenues over the last few years. Trying to talk a company like TiVo into disabling features that consumers want is probably a hard sell, but cable companies might be more receptive to the idea. Most cable operators also make money from local ad revenue, and would stand to gain revenue by making it harder for their customers to skip ads."

Depending on the degree of customer backlash, the cable companies could be all over this. Even if there is some backlash, I'd bet that ABC would be willing to pay a fee to the cable companies to block fast forwarding. Even if a legally mandated broadcast flag never materializes, I'd bet that the flag will still exist and expand in the future through voluntary agreements like the idea posed here.