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TiVo Starts Testing "Pop-up" Ads
mkraft writes "ZDNet is reporting that TiVo has started a testing a new pop-up style ad on a random and limited number of subscriber's TiVo as of this weekend. The ads are designed to be displayed on screen when the user fast forwards through specially tagged commercials. Clicking the thumbsup or select button on the TiVo remote will take the user to a menu containing more information about the advertisement (text and/or video).
Unfortunately according to reports on the TiVo Community forums the ads are also showing up during actual programs as well."
I actually saw one of these last night...a semi-transparent graphic that was displayed when I fast-forwarded through the commercials on "24". It wasn't as annoying as I thought it would be, but at the same time I don't remember what movie they were promoting.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
If people dont like this, just program your remote to do a 30 second skip instead of the 30 minute skip or whatever it is defaulted to. A couple of clicks and your past all the commercials. The other skip button will let you skip back 10 seconds if you happen to go too far into the show. It is instant and no chance of ads coming up (i guess until tivo disables it in newer versions).
If memory serves me right, Select -> Play -> Select -> 30 -> Select
I don't have to deal with popups, a small hard drive, a single hard drive and lack of upgradability. Plus, I have 3 tv tuner/encoders so I can record three shows simultaneously while watching a fourth recorded show.
I build my own HTPC using an Abit AN-7, AMD Athlon XP 2500+, Hauppauge PVR-250 tv tuner/encoder cards. It is driven by WinXP Pro SP2 and SageTV.
You can see my HTPC at http://wwww.terrystockdale.com/htpc/htpc_1.shtml .
Terry
I'm one of the (un)lucky saps to have this new feature. It makes rewinding and searching for a particular place in a show extremely difficult since the screen is superimposed with an advertisement for Nicole Kidman's latest movie :-(
Currently while watching a commercial supported TV broadcast, an advertiser has a commercial break in the program where they show 30 seconds of video. While using a TiVo and fast forwarding, this 30 seconds of video is blurry and takes less than 30 seconds to play.
...
Based on how it's supposed to work, with the new tags. While watching a commercial supported TV broadcast, an advertiser has a commercial break in the program where they show 30 seconds of video. While using a TiVo and fast forwarding, this 30 seconds of video is overlayed with a different image optimized for shorter visible duration and takes the same amount of time as before that's less than 30 seconds to play.
There is no impact to the way the TiVo functions.
There is no forced watching of ads.
There is no new add popping up.
It's simply a format shift from blurry video to a static image.
It's a way to redefine the 30 second spot. It becomes a less than 30 second spot of variable duration depending on the fast forward speed.
The easiest way to opt out of ads on TV:
Buy premium commercial free programming, like HBO, Showtime, Cinimax, Starz,
Since this is a pilot of the new tags, that obviously isn't working the way it's supposed to, things do need to change. Since it displayed over regular content where it's not supposed to.
Things we don't know:
Is the problem with the TiVo software?
Is the problem with the broadcasters national feed?
Is the problem with a specific cable companies regional feed?
Were the tags added at the start of a commercial and still present throughout the rest of the broadcast?
All of those need to be addressed before any solution is possible.
One problem people are reporting is that the overlaid ad makes it very difficult to see where to stop fast forwarding.
Also this happen on a rewind too if you read the Tivo forums. And due to a bug its displaying during the programs and not during the adds if you pause live.
SYS 49152
Bandwith is still too expensive, get a netflix or wal-mart DVD rental account, DVDs come by mail, DeCrypt them, DVD shrink em, Burn em on 50 cent blank DVD-r. pop em back in mailbox with flag up, wait to get more. the furthest you have to walk is to your mailbox, it costs under $20 a month, (walmart is even cheaper) and you can't beat the price of bandwith (~168 Gbit/~$1) Which is all covered under your subscription (they expect you to be able to make about 8-12 rentals a month or less, however, if you drop them off the day after they come you could average as many as 12-18 per month, depending on factors like USPS speed etc)
And with all those TV shows coming out on DVDs, chances are you can even get popular TV shows via netflix.
Best of all, the big studios make Some money (although not as much as if you bought the DVDs) so they'll never crack down on your supplier of almost free* movies (netflix/wal-mart etc.)
Anything you can't get via netflix you can DL, which will drastically cut down on how much you want/need to DL greatly. Others have mentioned myth TV, which is Yet Another option, but it won't cut out the ads, however there are splitting/merging tools that can be manually used to clip out ads, without recoding.
*= $1.50, to $3.50 depending on how often you return discs cost of media etc. If you actuall bother to DivX encode(which is a pain, and not worth my time) them, you can fit about 4-6 times the movies per disc, cutting media cost...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
First of all, the ad is for the product you're fast forwarding through - that is, if you fast forward throughb a movie ad, you'll see a "billboard" or a banner ad for THAT MOVIE.
And this got modded as INFORMATIVE??
You obviously have not seen one of these ads. I got an ad for The Interpreter last night (apparently the only ad TiVo's got right now) during "24" - there were no ads for this movie during the ads I was ff'ing through (that I could see, anyway).
The ad appears for the exact length of the ad as it's being fast forwarded - that is, about a second or two.
Uh, no. The ad appears for the entire duration you are fast-forwarding. In my case, this meant that yes, I missed the point at which the show came back several times, because the ad takes up more than 50% of the screen area, and it's right in the middle of the screen.
Apparently this is not supposed to happen (the ads are supposed to disappear when the show comes back), but a) to have it work properly TiVo would need some sort of commercial detect technology, and as far as I know it has none (it does know when special "flagged" commercials from co-sponsors run, but not all ads are flagged), b) that commercial detect technology would have to work 100% of the time, and no commercial detection does that, and c) even if TiVo did have such a thing, and it worked all the time, the TiVo boxes are so slow right now with the 7.1a software that they'd probably lag by 3 or 4 seconds anyway, which when ff'ing on 3X (which is really faster than 3X speed) could be two minutes into the TV show.
In short, these ads totally destroy one of the main reasons for using TiVo, and when you see one, you'll feel the same. The idea as I first heard it actually didn't bother me so much in theory (even though I am paying for this service after all, so I don't see why I should be seeing TiVo-delivered ads), but the implementation in practice is absolutely horrendous. It will definitely, 100% cause me to cancel my subscription if it is not completely redesigned.