RCA Progressive Scan DVD Player with ClearPlay

If you have young children, as we do, you know the feeling. You are watching an otherwise great movie that gets spoiled by some age-inappropriate language or your child sees a scene that you wish they hadn't. You wish that someone had forewarned you prior to watching the movie so that you could have muted the sound our covered your child's eyes.

Well, it appears that technology has come to our rescue in the form of a RCA DVD player with a content filter called ClearPlay. ClearPlay works with the regular DVDs that you already rent or purchase from your local stores. When you put a movie in a ClearPlay enabled DVD player, you can enjoy the show -- without needing to worry about the occasional R or PG-13 content. It's as if you had super-fast fingers and were able to punch remote control buttons fast and accurately enough to skip and mute certain content, but still maintain the movie's continuity and entertainment value.

The ClearPlay service uses "ClearPlay Filters" that are associated with each different movie. The ClearPlay filters are compiled by the company's staff of movie professionals. These professionals go through individual movies and identify content which may have contributed to a movie's PG-13 or R rating. The content they identify generally falls under the categories of graphic violence, sexual content, and language.

The user-interface is very simple. ClearPlay can be turned "on" or "off," which means that parents can watch "unfiltered" DVDs. When the filters are "on," you can also customize your filter preferences by adjusting 14 different filter settings (that gives you 16,384 potential user configurations!). Based on your settings, content will be skipped over or muted during playback of the movie. Great care and effort is taken to ensure that although certain content is removed, the continuity of the story is maintained, and the presentation retains its entertaining value. Many say the end result is similar to an airline or television presentation of the movie.

The RCA DVD Player comes with 100 pre-installed filters. ClearPlay offers two options to keep your filters up-to-date:

1) ClearPlay New Releases: For $4.95 a month (or $49 a year) you can get access to the complete library of all ClearPlay Filters, including New Releases.

2) ClearPlay Classics: For a one-time charge of $40 you can get access to ClearPlay Filters which are 90 days old. The $40 charge includes free updates for three years.

To install new ClearPlay filters all you need to do is to ClearPlay Update CD into your ClearPlay DVD player. ClearPlay can mail you update CDs, or you can download ClearPlay filters from the Internet and burn them onto a CD yourself.

The first ClearPlay-enabled DVD player, the RCA Progressive Scan DVD Player with ClearPlay, is now available at Wal-Mart.

-Tim