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Tivo Plans Commercials On Demand
MCSqrd writes "News.com reports that Tivo will soon feature interactive ads that apparently link from ordinary television commercials. Viewers can activate the link and view extended, interactive content about the product being advertised.
Tivo hopes to 'tune in' to a way to keep advertisers on their side since the idea of TV commercials being made obsolete because of PVRs has made them an enemy to marketing departments everywhere.
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"
This is not a new TiVo feature, it's an underused one at this point. There are a few car company ads that are presently use it.
The way it works is that the sponsors purchase a TiVo Showcase package, which is an advertising section that has always been part of TiVo. The Showcases can be filled with video content that is spliced out of the "Teleworld Infomercial"... a quasi-weekly program that TiVo purchases during the early morning hours on the Discovery Channel that all TiVos are programmed to return.
The sponsors then purchase a typical campaign's worth standard 30-second TV spots, and they encode in the VBI (the same place where Closed Captioning hides) a signals that all TiVos understand. This signal tells the TiVo that whenever this spot is encountered, to display a "Press Thumbs Up For More Information" icon while it is playing. If the user gives the confirming thumbs up signal on their remote, they're transported directly to the Showcase section for that sponsor. Whenever the user chooses to leave the Showcase, they'll be returned to exactly where they were in whatever program they were viewing.
You might be surprised to know that TiVo is recording this Teleworld Infomercial program, because it's never directly displayed in the user interface. You also might think that TiVo is kidnapping some of your diskspace... but in fact they're saving the ad content to the "reserved section" of TiVo's funky Linux-based OS. You never had access to that disk volume, and they already subtracted this space from the advertised hour-wise capacity of a unit. If you upgrade your TiVo's HD size, all of the additional space created goes to user recordings, the reserved space stays the same size.
Gotta give TiVo credit, they're finding a revenue model that actually issues a challenge to advertisers... come up with some ad content that makes people want to watch it.
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"
No, because this is the inverse of a blipvert. A blipvert was a split-second commerical inserted into Network XXIII programs, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing overweight viewers to explode.
This feature actually requires user input (a confirming click of the green Thumbs Up key during the conventional 30-second ad) in order to jump to a 3-minute presentation that has been stored on the TiVo harddrive. The user can bail out of the 3-minute presentation at any time and return to their "live" stream whenever they want. TiVo will do the favor of pausing the program at exactly the point they left it, where the user can fast-forward to catch up as much as they want.
TiVo actually has research to prove that people will actually rewatch a Pepsi comercial if Britney Spears is performing a dance routine while singing the soda company's jingle.
So it's not fair to say that nobody watches comercials with a TiVo... it's just that the ad sponsors have to come up with comercials people will want to watch when given the ability to "gong" them off the stage with a fast forward button.
although you could turn the volume to zero...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This is the kind of advertising i'll always watch.
Now if I can only convince them to do Victoria Secret TV spots i'll love it even more!
"The system doesn't work."
Are you saying that banner ads don't work? (Or are you referring to TiVo? Not sure I understand the phrasing of your sentence here. If I misread your point I'm sorry.)
Banner ads do work. That's why Slashdot's still here. If people are genuinely interested in the product being advertised, they go click the link. What doesn't work is that you can only get so much from them. Putting a Tampax banner on Slashdot isn't going to generate a lot of hits. Putting a ThinkGeek banner on Slashdot, however, generates a lot of views from interested people.
There are ways to make advertising work on the web. The first step, however, is not to get your hopes up high about how many people will come. The second is to target your audience. The third is to make your banner provide information that they're interested in. A whoopdeedoo flashy banner won't work as well as saying "This item is cool, here's why."
So could the TiVo think work? Potentially, yes. Start small. The R2D2 toy comes to mind. Show an ad for that during Enterprise. How many people watching that show would click the button? How many of those are genuinely interesting advertising hits? Think about it.
"Derp de derp."
> Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?
no, but it seems to me that Max Headroom was interesting because it was simply something different to look at. unfortunately, at this point in the flow of time, old school TV commercials aren't so interesting anymore.
what Tivo needs to do is promote some sort of development of interactive software that the viewer will *want* to mess around with. that way, Tivo could keep the viewer engaged while waiting for something less interactive to come along, like the next feed of some pr0n.
of course, I'm talking about a game that's fun to play and has Pepsi splattered all over it. Pepsi gets advertized, producers of old school commercials move to a new industry, Tivo gets its viable business model of commercials on demand, and geeks get paid.
what am I missing?
From the article summary:
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"
No, but you just proved you're an idiot. You see a banner ad on a webpage, and you know that if you click it you'll read more information about the product, right? That's apparently what this thing is.
Blipverts, in Max Headroom, were taking a commercial that normally lasts 30 seconds and compressing it down to say 1 second or so. Then a person watches it, gets so much mental stimulation that generates electrical pulses in the body and causes them to explode.
Not the same thing at all. So you can take off your computer-simulated tin-foil hat, this time.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Is this not like the "red button" programmes and adverts on Sky Digital?
A red circle appears at the top of the screen and if you want to know more, hit red and it takes you into a whole "interactive" section?
Seems to be up now
NBC is the major user of that automatic scheduling capability. However, in order to see it, you must be looking at a promo for an upcoming show that hasn't already aired yet. Most TiVo users are more than a couple days behind in their TV viewing and therefore are too late to have the automatic scheduler work, the show being promoted is already in the past.
Grab your tivo remote: press Select, Play, Select, 3, 0, select. The button that moves the marker forward 15 minutes is now a 30 second skip button.