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Tivo Plans Commercials On Demand

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the click-here-to-watch-more dept.

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?"

5 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Might be news to you, but it was always there. by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Might be news to you, but it was always there. by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, TiVo has figured out that it's much easier for them to throw out data over the broadcast airwaves. DirecTV-tied units get almost all of their data via download of a datastream on the satellites, and only use the modem call to send upbound reports. TiVo presently sends out software updates via the modem because they perfer to slowly roll out new versions to randomly selected customers before pushing them to the general population.

    2. Re:Might be news to you, but it was always there. by Skidge · · Score: 5, Informative

      As far as viewing movie times, there's a project on sourceforge called JavaHMO which is a Java-based replacement for TiVo's Home Media Option server. In addition to the normal functionality of playing mp3s and viewing photos, it allows you to view local movie times and weather forcasts through your TiVo's HMO menu. I played around with it a while ago and though it was rough around the edges at the time, it showed some nice promise. I'm not sure what it's like with current versions.

  2. This is no blipvert... by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Commercials? by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.