Parents are gaining a new tool to keep their children from viewing televised violence, sex and profanity.
The device has been dubbed "the V-chip," and come Thursday, federal law says, half of the new televisions sold in the United States with screens 13 inches or larger must have one. All sets of that size must include them by Jan. 1.
The first sets containing V-chips began arriving in stores this spring. Yet despite the heightened concern about the portrayal of violence in the media since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, the introduction is being greeted by yawns.
Retailers say few parents shopping for televisions are looking for sets with V-chips -- or even know they exist.
Lavera Briggs, manager of the television department at a Best Buy store in Willow Grove, Pa., near Philadephia, said shoppers rarely ask for a set with a V-chip. Sometimes parents are uninterested even after she points out the newly equipped sets.
Many parents appear clueless about the television rating system that the V-chip relies on, said Amy B. Jordan, a children's-programming researcher at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jordan said that several adults have told her that they thought the "FV" content rating stood for "family values." In fact, FV stands for "fantasy violence" and is designed to warn parents of programs that, though aimed at children age 7 and older, contain fantasy violence that is more intense than on other such shows.
A survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation last month reported that 77 percent of parents said they would use a V-chip to block shows they did not want their children to see. But the national telephone survey of 1,001 parents found that only 39 percent of them had seen or heard anything about the television rating system.
"I was a little disturbed by the continuing lack of understanding about how the rating system works," said Victoria Rideout, director of the foundation's Program on Entertainment Media and Public Health, which released the survey. "The level of parental concerns is so high about television content, and here is this new tool that has been out for about 18 months to address that."
To help dispel confusion, the Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif., and other agencies and groups, including the Center of Media Education in Washington and the Federal Communications Commission, are rolling out educational campaigns to coincide with Thursday's V-chip deadline.
The campaigns are expected to include Web sites, toll-free phone numbers, and free booklets that will describe how the V-chip and the television ratings system work.
FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani, who is leading a commission task force overseeing the implementation of federal V-chip regulations, said the goal was to make sure the public was better informed before the new TV season and the fall flurry of TV purchases.
All of the major television manufacturers -- who make 90 percent of the 25 million sets sold in the United States annually -- are expected to meet this week's deadline, Tristani said. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association, said the industry group was developing a logo and stickers that retailers could use to identify V-chip-equipped sets in stores.
A new set isn't necessary to take advantage of the new filtering device, which is far more sophisticated than those that for years have allowed consumers to block entire channels. A V-chip box designed to sit atop a television is already available for about $80.
Actually, the V-chip is not a single chip at all. It is a system of integrated circuitry inside a television that can "read" a stream of data sent by a broadcaster.
The V-chip employs the same technology that closed captioning does. But instead of decoding a portion of the data stream that provides captions useful for the hearing impaired, the V-chip picks up TV ratings that are similarly encoded. The rating is transmitted about every three seconds.
Because the V-chip largely relies on existing technology, Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association officials say sets that have the feature should cost only "pennies" more than new sets that don't.
The owner of a V-chip-equipped set can program the remote control to block out shows according to ratings. For example, a parent of young children could decide to screen out all programs rated TV-PG, TV-14 and TV-M.
The adult user has an access code similar to a personal identification number used with automated teller machines. When a program comes on that the television has been set to block, a warning appears saying the viewer is not authorized to see it. Punching in the four-digit code lets parents watch such shows without reprogramming the set.
"We tried to make it so the consumer could set it up once and then forget about it," said David Arland, manager of government and public relations at Thomson Consumer Electronics in Indianapolis, which manufactures RCA, GE and Proscan televisions. "Presumably, the child does not know the code."
A television equipped with a V-chip does not block anything unless the consumer programs in "parental controls." The process is much like programming a VCR, with on-screen menus that are activated via the set's remote control.
The V-chip had its beginnings in 1990, when Congress passed the Television Violence Act to reduce on-screen violence. Three years later, talk about creating a V-chip surfaced after Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and former Rep. Jack Fields, R-Texas, introduced a bill calling for TVs with at least 13-inch screens to contain components that would enable parents to block some programs. That year engineers at the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association in Arlington, Va., and its members devised the V-chip.
Congress took up the call for parental controls in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, directing the FCC to work with manufacturers to develop V-chip specifications.
In early 1997, the Motion Picture Association of America and TV broadcasters proposed a voluntary ratings system with six categories. The FCC adopted those categories when it required that V-chip-equipped sets be available by Thursday.
All television shows are supposed to be rated, except for news and sports programs and unedited movies carried on premium channels. Major networks except for NBC have implemented the voluntary ratings fully. NBC uses the age-based ratings, but does not include content labels, such as S for sex or FV for fantasy violence, that the V-chip allows to be selectively filtered. Black Entertainment Television has opted not to use the ratings at all.
TV makers are required only to include V-chips that allow parents to block rated programs. But some manufacturers, including Zenith, Thomson and Hitachi, have designed them so that parents can block nonrated shows as well.
"The parents we talked to said, 'If you are not going to offer unrated-program blocking, what was the point?'" Arland recalled, noting that Jerry Springer's and other talk shows are not rated because they are labeled news shows.
Other companies have limited the blocking in their sets to rated programs.
"The rating system is out there," said Steve Nickerson, vice president of marketing at Toshiba Consumer Products. "We didn't see giving that option as being something that was worth putting into a set."