Bad Tivo, bad



Tivo just announced a new wrinkle to their DVR. It seems that in March 2005 Tivo will lay "billboards" or banner ads over each commercial. these billboards will eventually lead to rich content (where the user can use the remote to access additional information about the ad), but for now all I hear is that I won't be able to skip ads the way I've been doing since I first bought my Tivo.

Currently, there's a 30-second skip hack that you can program into your Tivo's remote. Wait for the fade out of the recorded (or delayed) program you're watching and the user can effectively skip through a commercial break cleanly with a few clicks of the remote. Besides the benefit of not having to suffer through terribly uninspired American ad material, the 30-second advance feature also "compresses" a given show down many minutes. And the more popular the show-I'm talking about the commercial laden Desperate Housewives-the more compressed the program becomes.

So, Tivo, I've got a few questions and one suggestion for you. Why are you telling your customers like me that if I want to watch a recorded program I have to do it your (advertisers) way? Doesn't that undermine the fundamental benefit of your product? This wouldn't be a problem if you would have gone back to the heavy hand and told it to make better commercials: we wouldn't skip commercials if they were good.

What the hell has happened in this country? Why are more and more companies telling consumers how to use their products? Why are advertisers telling Tivo what to do with a consumer product? Isn't this ass backwards? Shouldn't the customer, or market place, tell companies what to do? Perhaps the market place will tell Tivo that they don't like critical features being culled from the feature set by canceling their piece of the $12.95/month revenue stream for the company.

As for now, I'm not doing anything. I'll wait to see how this falls out, but I've already heard of a few Tivo customers who are literally tossing out their machines and canceling their subscriptions, opting instead for PC's programmed to do the same Tivo acrobatics.



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Posted: Fri - November 19, 2004 at 08:52 AM          

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