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It could herald the biggest shake-up in British commercial television since a tube of toothpaste floated into view alongside an iceberg and a well-spoken man announced with great urgency that Gibbs SR is "the tingling fresh toothpaste that does your gums good too." That advertisement, broadcast at 8.12pm on 22 September 1955, was the first to be shown on British television. Now nearly 50 years on, senior voices in the advertising industry are openly questioning the future of the traditional commercial break. The villain of the piece is the "personal video recorder", or PVR, which enables viewers to whizz through unwanted commercial breaks at 30 times the normal speed. Thus, a commercial break that ought to last three minutes can be passed over in six seconds. Manufacturers are planning a massive roll-out of the technology in the new year.

Like the traditional VCR, the PVR records television programmes. Unlike the standard video machine, it does not record on tape but on a hard disc, similar to that attached to home computers. It is vastly easier and more convenient to use. Sky aims virtually to triple its sale of PVR boxes to 300,000 within nine months. Peter Bazalgette, chairman of Britain's biggest independent television producer, Endemol UK, said that the take-off of the PVR "signifies a potential fault line in the advertising business. Not to put too fine a point on it, the advertising agencies are shitting themselves because they see their traditional business (producing standard 30-second TV commercials) crumbling at the edges." According to Bazalgette, who brought Big Brother to Britain, "the blunt instrument of 30-second commercials in an ad break that everybody watches is on its way out".

Research among PVR users in Australia found that 23% "never" watch TV commercials. In Britain, the dominant PVR is Sky Plus, marketed by the satellite broadcaster BskyB. There are up to 60,000 homes with the rival Tivo, though that hardware is no longer on sale in the UK. BskyB has recently begun a big marketing push - and the growth rate is extraordinary. Two years ago, there were no Sky Plus boxes at all. By September 2003, there were 121,000 consumers. Sky aims to have sold 300,000 by June 2004, though industry insiders suggest that the company knows it will easily break through that target. Many broadcasting executives do not think it will be long before there are a million boxes in circulation.

Andy Roberts, executive UK buying director of Starcom Motive, the agency responsible for planning the advertising spending of companies such as Barclays Bank and Procter and Gamble, Britain's biggest advertiser, predicts that PVRs will take off rapidly. "What advertisers have to remember is that, at the end of the day, people do not want to watch commercials. So if people can edit them out, they will do so," he said. "This is something that is very worrying for an industry that has built itself around 30-second commercials. The challenge in the future, if PVRs take off in a big way, is to find a new way to get our message across." Research in Australia suggests that the central problem for advertisers is that PVRs threaten to strip them of their most lucrative customers.

According to a study by Professor Duane Varan, director of the Interactive Research Institute at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia - coincidentally, named after the Australian essayist Sir Walter Murdoch, an uncle of Sky's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, though the media baron has no links with the institution - 32% of PVR owners in Australia own more than $100,000 and 25% have a postgraduate degree. Such well-educated high earners are just the sort of consumers that advertisers can least afford to lose. In Britain, the technology is not well enough established for much research to have been carried out. But a spokeswoman for Sky, whose big push for Sky Plus was accompanied by a large price cut, claimed that there was no need for advertisers to panic - yet. She argued that consumers would absorb commercial messages even at high-speed playback.

"PVRs have not been around for long enough for an accurate view of the effect they will have on advertising," the spokeswoman said. "But anecdotal evidence suggests that even if viewers do fast forward through the commercials, there is still a very high recall of the adverts that people are passing through. Unlike fast-forwarding on video machines, with Sky Plus the picture quality is still good even at 30 times the speed." But if advertisers come to the conclusion that traditional commercial breaks are losing their power, they will not cease trying to influence consumers' buying behaviour. Mr Bazalgette said that although he did not believe the traditional ad was dead, advertisers would increasingly use other methods, with more sponsored shows, product placement and "advertiser-funded programming", whereby an advertiser pays directly for the making of a show and hands it, for free, to broadcasters.

Such shows are already tucked away in the schedule, for example Gillette World Sport, which is aired on ITV1, and Toyota World of Wildlife, which was broadcast this year on Channel Five. "There are all sorts of sophistications to come, but that does not mean that spot advertising is dead - rather that, in much the same way we no longer get 25 million viewers watching Morecambe and Wise at Christmas, advertising too is going to get more fragmented," Mr Bazalgette said. Critics argue that the problem with advertising funded programming and product placement is that they are less up front about the fact that they are in the business of shifting products. Television commercials do not pretend to be doing anything other than encouraging you do pop down to the shops. (Source: The Independent)