V-chip

The U.S. President Bill Clinton holding a V-chip in 1996

V-chip is a technology used in television set receivers in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States, that allows the blocking of programs based on their ratings category. It is intended for use by parents to manage their children's television viewing based on blocking systems. Televisions manufactured for the United States market since January 2000 are required to have the V-chip technology.[1] Since the idea for blocking programs in this way was patented and tested in Canada by Brett West and John P. Gardner in 1994,[2] many devices using V-chip technology have been produced.[3]

V-chip technology works much like closed captioning and uses the vertical blanking interval in the television signal. The system receives a special code in the broadcast signal that indicates the show's score according to a simple numerical rating system for violence, sex, and language.[4] The programs' signals are encoded based on their rating, on line 21 of the broadcast signal's vertical blanking interval using the XDS protocol, and this is detected by the television set's V-chip. If the program rating is outside the level configured as acceptable on that particular television, the program will be blocked. The V-chip does not block infomercial, news or sportscasts as this sort of programming does not have ratings.

The V-chip has a four-digit numerical password in order to keep older children from changing its settings. The V-chip can be overridden by anyone who reads the television's instruction and finds out how to reset the password to 0000 (built into the V-chip in case the parents themselves forget the password that they set).

The phrase "V-chip" was purportedly coined by then-Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts. According to him the "V" stands for "violence".[5] By contrast, in an interview with Tim Collings, one of the people who claim to have invented the device, he said that it was intended to stand for "viewer control".[6]

  1. ^ "Commissioner Gloria Tristani commends manufacturers for meeting deadlines to install V-chips in televisions". FCC. June 9, 1999. Retrieved June 23, 2010. The rules adopted by the Commission require that, as of July 1, 1999, half of all new televisions with screens of 13" or greater be equipped with a V-Chip and that all such televisions be equipped with this technology as of January 1, 2000.
  2. ^ Teresa Riordan (October 28, 1996). "Two inventors contend that the V-chip is an idea they've seen before -- in their own patent" (News). The New York Times. Retrieved June 23, 2010.
  3. ^ "The V-Chip: Options to Restrict What Your Children Watch on TV". Federal Communications Commission. May 25, 2011. Retrieved November 19, 2021.
  4. ^ Montgomery, Kathryn C. Generation Digital:politics, commerce, and childhood in the age of the internet. (2007) The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
  5. ^ Mifflin, Lawrie (March 12, 1998). "Question Lingers as FCC Prepares V-Chip Standards". New York Times. Retrieved October 11, 2008.
  6. ^ Lavers, Daphne (September 2001). "TV's Ultimate Irony: Sex and Violence sells only Sex and Violence". deltablue.ca. Delta Blue Communications. Retrieved November 29, 2007.[dead link‍]