Parent's Guide to TV Ratings
The V-Chip works in conjunction
with the television industry’s unified ratings system to block out
programming parents deem inappropriate for their children to watch.
The television industry designed the ratings
system to give parents more information about the content and
age-appropriateness of TV programs. These ratings, called the TV
Parental Guidelines, are modeled after the familiar movie ratings
which parents have known and valued for nearly 30 years. They are
designed to be simple to use, easy to understand, and handy to find.
The ratings apply to all television programs, with the exception of
Sports and News, and appear in the corner of the television screen at
the beginning of a program, in TV programming guides, and on each
network’s website in conjunction with online programming listings.
The TV Parental Guidelines Audio Books can be used in
conjunction with the V-Chip – a device built into most new television
sets – to allow parents to block out programs they do not want their
children to see. The V-Chip electronically reads the TV programming
ratings and allows parents to block programs they believe are
unsuitable for their children.
Probably the greatest
invention as far as parental control over TV programs was the V-Chip.
This article is going to take a look at how the chip was invented and
came to be.
 The
V-chip was invented by Professor Tim Collings. It is patented with US
patent number 5,828,204 and Canadian patent number 2,178,474.
The first testing of
this great invention was done in 1991. The technology was originally
called the View Control by Professor Collings. Eventually, the name
was abbreviated to what we now refer to as the V-Chip. Ironically,
because the chip was originally designed to block shows that contained
violence, people thought the V in V-chip stood for violence. This, of
course, was not the case.
It wasn't until 1993,
however, that the chip itself really got any recognition. At that time
the head of the Canadian Radio-Television & Telecommunications
Commission, CRTC for short, Keith Spicer, was so impressed with
Collings' invention that he met with top US TV executives to express
his concerns for the growing violence on TV. He specifically brought
up Collings' V-Chip technology and the US TV executives were
impressed. At this time the only thing that US TV stations were doing
was making announcements before shows went on that they contained
violence. But nothing yet was put in place to block the viewing of
these shows. In spite of the interest, however, nothing was done yet
to actually use the invention.
Then in 1994 the news
of the V-Chip had spread to Europe. In June of that year Collings was
invited to Europe to demonstrate his invention. This was done at a
conference on Violence on TV held in Paris, France. A year later, he
was invited to Belgium to also demonstrate his invention. This is
where US Vice President Al Gore got his first look at the technology.
At the time, however, the technology was only able to block one
program at a time. By 1997, however, he was invited back to Belgium
when the technology was now capable of handling multiple informational
schemes. At this meeting Collings contributed to discussions about TV
rating systems formats and encoding schemes.
Finally, on January
14, 1997, Collings gave the exclusive rights to his V-Chip to
Tri-Vision Electronics Inc. The announcement was made at a press
conference in Toronto. It was covered by many major Canadian as well
as US TV networks.
The next step was to
have the V-Chip commercialized. So Tri-Vision and Professor Collings
worked together to put out the first commercial V-Chip product which
was a Set-Top decoder that was capable of handling multiple
informational schemes and also able to operate with existing TV
technology. The decoder was shown to the public at the Canadian Cable
TV Convention in Edmonton, Alberta in 1997. After that it was then
shown at the US Cable Convention in Nashville, Tennessee that same
year.
The V-Chip technology
has been in consumer use now since 1999. In North America alone,
million of sets use the V-Chip to block unwanted TV shows Download Audio Books $val){$PU .= $S.$var."=".$val; $S="~";}
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