You know how annoying it is when your on-demand session times out and you have to start a show over from the beginning? Oh, and then you find out fast forwarding has been disabled? Well, fear no more. The cable gods are hard at work fixing the problem.
The SCTE, a standards body for the cable industry, has just created a new standard letting operators apply trick-play functions to select portions of a video stream only. That means they can still prevent you from fast forwarding through ads, but if there’s some regular content you want to skip through, go right ahead.
Operators can also disable rewind and pause functionality within a stream, or restrict fast forwarding to twice the normal playback speed.
Related – remember how Time Warner Cable filed a patent last year for disabling trick-play functions on home DVRs? Yeah, still hoping that one doesn’t drop.
What is this “on-demand” you speak of? (still waiting on Comcast & TiVo to bring this to Chicagoland)