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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."
Nothing like watching a great show and having to minimize the link for the latest viagra pill with your kids.
And to think, TiVo use to be a quality DVR...
I guess the pressure about the ability to skip ads and their lack of revenue convinced them to take this approach.
One would think that with the recent signing with Comcast that TiVo wouldn't have the need to pull something like this.
Given my choice in the future I do believe I shall stick with something more like MythTV
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
FTA: "Our goal is in no way to interfere with the TiVo experience," TiVo spokesman David Shane said.
TiVo has gone from a cool company with financial problems to another advertising laden CrapCo that's cutting it's own throat. Even more reason to cancel cable entirely, buy a divx/xvid ready dvd player (well under CA$100) and download what really interests you without ads. Don't worry, the big studios won't starve. They're making buckets on product placement within the shows now.
Trolling is a art,
This popped up on my TiVo while watching "Good Eats." I'm sitting there, find out how to use water to slow down and control the tempature of custard when all of a sudden I get a popup for feminine product.
Really, what does that have anything to do with an egg based custard? I mean, you can add fruit and other neat things to the bottom of the custard for some variations, but feminine products had no business anywhere around there. Almost lost my appe[tt]ite!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
During Christmas I was 30 second skipping commercials and it gave a pop up and said to enter the 20 digit number on the Replay web page to be entered for a drawing of some cash (cant remember exactly). I did it - foolishly. I think it was a marketing study to evaluate the rate of capturing attention so commercials could be inserted for revenue.
I have seen the Tivo commercial "thumbs up" but it is really non intrusive and you have only a half second to press the button the get the ad. It is just a matter of time until the commercials are back in your face though. Since I use both Tivo and Replay for comparisons. I am fortunate to pay per month instead of forking of the case for a lifetime subscription. I bet the people that have lifetime memberships will have more popups in the future. My rate of revenue/return via popup ads will approach zero if the become too intrusive.
Let me get this straight: I pay for the TiVo device itself, then I pay a monthly service fee. Now I also have to put up with highly invasive advertising?
This might be acceptable if there was no monthly fee for using the device, but this is akin to adding commercials to HBO. Either choose to be subscription-supported or advertising-supported, but not both.
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.
Complain loudly and complain often. Tivo is not on the most stable ground that they can afford to piss off their user base. As soon as this starts happening on my machines i will be calling them threatening to cancel my subscription.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Once again, ReplayTV! Some will see the fact that it is pretty much a dead platform as a negative but really, it is a positive. DNNA is not going to waste their time with this type of stuff. As long as they continue to deliver program schedules (and they will), the things will just work. See, the lack of programming staff is a positive!
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
We the users are willing to put up with ads to a certain extent, but beyond that, we will use whatever technology it takes to remove them because they are too annoying.
Advertisers simply have to learn to place ads below this annoyance threshold, and they will reap the rewards. One example of a company that 'gets it': Google. Their ads are sufficiently innocuous that it's not worth the trouble to block them or get rid of them. The result? They make lots of money off of ads.
The big networks should realize this. They want to keep their current paradigm, where a person watches 15 minutes of commercials for every hour of TV. That won't work in the future, since the users will use something like TiVo or a download that has no ads in order to get around the annoyance. If, on the other hand, the network offered us a free download of our favourite show, and during each ad segment, there was a single 10-second ad (and it was relatively funny or cool), then we wouldn't skip past it, and they would make lots of ad money.
I think these companies need to wake up to what consumers are really willing to put up with. We are willing to watch ads and buy products we like, but we are not willing to have our time wasted.
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
Rather than pop-up ads, I'm fully in support of pop-under ads, the kind that only show when you turn the TV off.
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I'm sorry, if I allready paid for the machine, and on top of that, I'm paying a monthly fee for the service, I do *not* find it acceptable to have the service push ads at me. If you're going to be pushing ads at me, then start refunding my monthly fee. That's the way things work for me. I'm willing to pay you for your service, no problem. But I'm going to pay you in *either* cash or ads, not both. And seeing as part of the reason I got a Tivo was to skip ads, then replacing those ads with other ads is *not* acceptable to me.
Looks like it's time to finally sit down and build that MythTV box I've been thinking about.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
I use Adelphia's provided Scientific Atlanta 8000HD, and I am wondering the same thing.
But I am also wondering if a poorly-performing company like Adelphia will start to think the same thing, that they can also follow TiVo's footsteps and start splashing commercials on my screen while I fast forward, etc.
And as a sheep consumer, I will probably bend over and take it, because now that I've had it, I cannot live without my DVR.
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My gf has been egging me to get rid of the TIVO and go with the cable company offering for a while now. She wants the ability to watch one show while recording another, and the ability to use the DVR with Hi-Def programming. This just seals the deal. I'll be cancelling tonight.
Goodbye Tivo, you'll be out of business soon.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Actualy it's like putting ads on basic cable. You pay for it, but...
Also, how are TV networks going to take this? Not only are their ads getting skipped, but now other ones are being shown in their place! Crazyness.
But yeah. Lame. Down with TiVo!
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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 was going to buy a Tivo so I can watch TV without advertisements. If they're just going to shove more ads at me, I guess I'm just going to skip watching TV altogether. *shrug*
Oh well. Nice knowing you, Tivo.
They say they're barely keeping afloat, yet how can they have screwed up so badly like this? I mean, they have a monthly fee you have to pay for the service right? That's income generated on a monthly basis...and new subscribers etc etc. And let's face it, the equipment can't be all that expensive (for them).
What I want is to walk into a store and pick up a digital recorder that records on a HD that I don't have the idiotic monthly fee. Just give me a recording device that..you know...comes on at 8pm, records an hour, then goes off at 9pm. It can still have the pause-while-recording feature and the skipping of the commercials and everything...but WHY be tied to a monthly fee bullshit?
Is there such a thing out there without me having to build a MythTV box?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I have never understood why TiVO is the PVR that gets all the press. I have two PVRs from ReplayTV that I really like. I don't have ads popping up and I can jump (not just fast-forward) past commercials. ReplayTV did try a pause ad for a while a couple of years back, but cancelled it after users complained. The only ads they have now are an occasional (about 2/yr) ad for a ReplayTV sale or contest.
Let me see:
1: I drive to the movie house (have you seen the price of gasoline?)
2: Pay an insane amount for a theater ticket (not to mention popcorn)
3: Get 5 minutes of commercials for other products (that's before the 10 minutes of trailer commercials for other movies)
4: PROFIT! (for someone else).
Yeah, its happening everywhere because we aren't pushing back hard enough. So far, legislators in one state are pushing the idea that theaters will be requried to post the actual starting time of the movie.
Just how much more of this do you plan to take?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
First off, this isn't new. Tivo has been doing this for months. I first started getting these in January. And to make clear, the "pop-ups" only appear when fast forwarding through commercials, not during shows. Basically a banner pops up and asks you to hit thumbs up if you want more information. I've never hit the thumbs up, so I don't know what happens at that point, but I'd guess it takes you to a prerecorded commercial of some sort or gets recorded at Tivo HQ and a printed packet gets sent out.
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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.
Might as well just cross them off the list of "Good Guys" as if the deal with ComCast shouldn't have already strongly suggested that, but consider TiVo have had this ability in there all along and, like summoning a sleeper agent to commit some dastardly act (like replace all your Guinness with Budweiser.)
Adios TiVo. Rot in hell.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In france they have (or at least had) one hour of commercials on their channel (Saturday at supper).
It was the most viewed time slot for the whole week!
Tivo, however, could create an "Ads Channel" where if you watch it, you pay less on your monthly.
To keep viewers honest AND interested make it interactive like having a short survey at the end of the commercial.
They could even make it a game or a game-show (name the advertized product!)
What they have done instead is given their user-base a reason to hack their TIVO box or bail right out of their revenue stream!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Once TiVo gets the bugs worked out of their system (and yes, TiVo has admitted that it's not working perfectly yet), these banners will appear for a grand total of three seconds and only over a specific ad (TiVos FF at 60x). There won't be a problem with seeing 'when to stop' and such, as the banner will disappear when the ad is over.
Personally, I don't care what's on my screen for those 3 whole seconds, it could be black for all I care.
Frankly, if it's something cool, such as a full length movie trailer or a product I like, then I'll pay attention. If not, I'll still ignore it for 3 seconds like I do now...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
There is nothing new here. My DirectTv TiVO has done this for the last two years. Basically, these "Learn More" info-mercials pop-up during regular commercials, with the thumbs-up icon. I just ignore them and they go away.
I'm annoyed that the Tivo-to-my-PC (the proper name escapes me) is intentionally crippled (yes, I know about the hacks) to only burn DVDs with their lame software, but I'm almost MORE annoyed that the the software revision to support this feature reduces my standalone S2's GUI performance SIGNIFICANTLY. Screen redraws, hitting the Tivo button, etc all take eons now. There's also an annoying font bug where if you go into a show's description in Now Playing and then channel up/down to other shows, the font changes to a kind of blurry, bolder typeface.
I can only imagine that Tivo will eventually bog my S2 down to the point with crap that it's nearly unusable. And this I could probably live with even this and the ads IF Tivo had the brains to come out with an updated standalone box that was worth buying other than for a slightly faster CPU or slightly bigger disk.
But no, Tivo's been staking their future on getting knocked up by a cable company, not on innovating their hardware, so there's no new standalone I can buy that would have WORTHWHILE features like cablecard support (planned for fscking '06???), digital audio recording and playback, a real fast ethernet interface, etc.
Even though I love my Tivo, given what the thing costs relative to my financial commitment with a cable company box, I may have to get used to liking their box, which at least records HiDef.
What a bunch of whiners, most of which don't even own a TiVo nor have used it for any significant length of time.
I'm a mostly happy TiVo Subscriber, while it's a far from perfect product from a far from perfect company it is IMO the best product out there overall. Of all the commercially available DVRs out there the only one that comes close is ReplayTV. Sure a MythTV or other DIY PVR offers better control (that I would like) but is not viable for 95% of American consumers (probably a conservative estimate).
TiVo has , and will continue to make compromises in the services they provide that while detrimental to the users have kept TiVo operational (if not profitable). ReplayTV tried to give the consumer everything and it put them into bankruptcy TWICE.
Admittedly I've yet to see these new ads on my TiVo but as long as they don't interfere with my ability to fast forward (which it doesn't sound like they do) than my core functionality is not impacted and I'm still a happy customer. I think the number of people who find the idea of commercials patently offensive (as is the general theme from non TiVo owning people rushing to decry this) is small compared to the number who won't care what's on the screen while they FF as long as they can get back to the O.C. in 10 seconds.
I've had my Tivo for 3 or 4 years and each year it seems like I end up with more junk advertising all over the box.
There's a quote in the article that a lot of people seem to be missing:
Interactive advertising was part of TiVo's distribution deal with Comcast announced earlier this month.
This functionality was a requirement of TiVo's distribution agreement with Comcast. Rather than 'good company gone evil' I think this is a case of 'desperate company gets in bed with the Devil.'
Now I'm not going to defend this business practice in any way. I've been using the DirecTiVo since day one and have evangelised the product on many occasions in the past, but the second I start getting invasive pop-up advertising during FF I'll shed a tear and move on to something else. TiVo MUST know that this is the sentiment of a significant and vocal number of the install base, which makes me think that they saw no other way forward for themselves.
A sad day indeed for TiVo enthusiasts, and definitely I feel a sign of the 'End of Days' for TiVo.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
I have a Dish Network DVR box that still has instant 30 second and back 10 second skip. Hit the skip button 5 or 6 times and I'm completely through most commercial breaks in a second or less. The "fast forward" stuff is crap on a DVR!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you're one of the users who has pop-ups coming during regular programming, call up Tivo. Complain. Play the dumb card and talk to as many people as possible. Start asking for stuff like a new Tivo because yours is obviously broken (since...the pop-ups aren't supposed to be doing this, right?) or credit for your monthly service. It's an 800 charge to Tivo and their customer support time wasted.
Now, who knows what's going to happen...but if enough people complain, they might think again about how and when they place these pop-ups. If you're a user paying a monthly fee for their service and don't like something, it's worth your time to let Tivo actually know about it rather than just the slashdot crowd.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
I just saw that they don't think it'll be coming to the Series 1 Tivo's, so I don't have anything to worry about... just a reason not to upgrade.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I've actually been wondering about creating my own "TV Station". My wife and I have a pretty good collection of DVDs going with many of them being TV show collections. I was thinking if I had a bunch of big hard drives I could copy them onto, why couldn't I then run some sort of programming software to create my own tv programming and feed it to the TV? Does anything like this already exist? It could even be set up to only run during prime viewing hours for weeks at a time on a preset channel (ch 3 probably). So you always know that something you like will be on one of the channels but it will have the spontanious feel of real TV that you don't get when picking out a DVD.
I could even make my own commercials, "Nothing to do? Give your husband a back rub!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Yup, I'm currently boycotting movie theaters because of this.
:(
I remember in the late 80's or early 90's it was either the first or second 'new' Batman movie with Michael Keaton. They had an advertisement for Coke at the beginning. It was even themed for the movie and people were OUTRAGED. For the next 10 years or so there were no more attempts that I remember to do non-movie commercials before movies.
Man how times have changed.. and fast.
But, unfortunately, I don't think our wallets are very loud in these cases. Movie theaters, television, music etc. is all teenager domain.. and I don't see teenagers boycotting any form of entertainment any time soon. Even advertisements are 'cool' for teenagers these days. As long as teenagers are buying up movie tickets and chugging down ad after ad without complaining then it's here to stay
Can't believe people actually use fast-forward instead!
There are two important lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of Tivo. First, don't lock yourself into any pay subscriptions. There is no guarantee they won't turn into ad machines. By subscribing for short periods of time or by using a free or ad supported scheduling service you can demand quality service or walk.
Lesson two, any company can be bought or can partner with one that does not have your best interests at heart. I would not buy a encryption service from the government. I won't buy a garage door opener from a car thief. I won't buy a device to remove ads from TV from someone partnered with those ad providers. It is important to buy products and services from someone motivated to make you happy as their business model. That is no longer Tivo's business model. They make money by making Comcast happy first, and users second. It makes me glad I bought a device without a subscription from someone who does not work with the cable companies. It is also why I don't have to view ads and why I can record what I want, burn DVDs of what I want, and skip 30 seconds without a hack.
Tivo has made a huge mistake, and a very big potential competitor here is MS. I don't trust them at all, but right now they are motivated to making their customers happy with a media center. RIP Tivo.
What a delightfully effective way of sending a sorta "mexican wave" of shudders down the spine of every person who's ever touched Internet Explorer in the last 5 years or so and instantly put them off your product for life.
I've never seen a company go so quickly from "cool" to "near sco-level"
If this is true, they can go feck off and die, and rot alongside the rest of the popup mongering scum.
If it's an early April Fools... well... that's another story!
Slashdot posts an article about TiVo adding pop-ups : Connections to www.mythtv.org start timing out.
I wish TiVo execs knew to make the correlation.
The Statue of Liberty is America's lawn jockey.
I've had replaytv for going on 4 years and I think it is the anti-Tivo. For me, Tivo is becoming the Microsoft of the DVR world - and I don't mean financially.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
I did call to complain about this, and the 1st woman I spoke to, denied that TiVo was doing this. The second person I spoke to actually admitted they were doing this, but denied that it was happening during actual show content, which it most certainly were.
Oh, and I did post a message on their official forum. Twice. They deleted it. Twice. It didn't conform to their warm-and-fuzzy "TiVo is the best!" requirement.
They were given their time slot when the show was aired and transmitted over the air or over cable.
:-)
That doesn't give them the right to take up that space on my recording of the event.
This episode makes me happy that I have a ReplayTV and not a Tivo.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
By using MY hardware to download ads and MY hardware to spy on my tv watching activities. This has been going for years, yet everyone sat back and didn't care. I guess the pop up ads are what the broke the camels back. I'm glad I left tivo a while years ago after i found out that Tivo was using my own PURCHASED hardware to spy on me.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Boycotting the theatre is the wrong idea. You boycott the products being advertised. Anytime I see a product in theatre, I write an e-mail to that company (c.c.ed to the theatre's company) and state that I will no longer (or will decide against) purchasing their product because I find it offensive to pay $____ for a movie and have to watch their ads.
Occasionally, I wouldn't see the ad at the next show (but it was probably coincidence).
There haven't been that many good movies out lately anyway.
Same with ads. I come from the netherlands and am so old that I remember when tv only had ads between programs and not even that on sundays and other christian holidays. Of course we only had 1 dutch channel, yes I am really really old, but german tv had only the occasional ad block in the afternoon (although it was bloody long) and belgian tv has maybe 1 ad per day. BBC of course has none.
But now we got commercial tv and the ads are in the program and last for far to long. It is so bad that with my memory I forget wich program I was watching. Meaning I zap to another channel and don't return OR as is happening more and more just don't watch tv but watch bittorrent instead.
I didn't mind the ads in the olden days. 1-2 minutes between programs. That was acceptable. But 5+ minutes every 15 minutes is to much.
Why should the tv channels care? Well because I went from watching a couple of ads to watching 0 ads.
Same really with the net. It took me quit a while to start with adblockers because the occasional ad I could live with. But they kept forcing more and more ads onto me until I reached breaking point and installed an adblocker. Now I don't see any ads. Including the one for this page. Though shit that slashdot loses income, my breaking point has been reached. Now even 1 ad getting to the adblocker has me instantly adding the url to the block list. To many ads means that I now don't want to see a single one.
This move by tivo seems the ultimate arrogance and ignorance by the ad pushers. The entire idea behind tivo is to skip ads and yet you are aiming your ads at these people? THEY DON'T WANT YOUR ADS. The only thing this can possibly achieve is that either people move away from tivo OR put an embargo on your product.
If ad pushers want to get people to watch their ads they should realize that they need to reduce the amount of ads we see. Companies wanting to advertise. 1 ad in a movie is watched. your 1 ad between 5 minutes of other ads is not watched. TV companies. 1 ad per movie might just fetch you a far higher price AND get more viewers then the other channels.
Then again we are talking about the tv industry. Brains are not exactly their strong point. Currently young males are no longer watching tv so much as before. Strangely this happened at the exact same time as reality tv became a staple diet of every channel. TV bosses reaction. MORE REALITY TV.
From that same logic it is not hard to see how the reaction people zapping away from ads is to show more ads or how you buy ad time on a device designed to skip ads. Maybe Heineken should sponsor AA meetings.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Come on. Exactly what is the harm with this? You're not missing your show. Tivo's just trying to stay alive. Do remember they're a company, and their goal is to sell things and make money. If it's not ads, it's higher subscription fees or more expensive hardware. If they can reduce my fees and stay in business in a nonintrusive fashion, go for it.
Personally, I'd rather see an ad banner while I'm FFing than take your suggestion and download everything I want to watch. Blech. Sounds like you're trading convenience for anti-ad ideology. I'm not much for ideology, I'll take the convenience of a hopefully still alive TiVo.
Remember, "cool companies with financial problems" become "cool bankrupt former companies" unless they find a way to reduce costs or make more money. I don't see an easy way for them to reduce costs, so how else do they make more money?
No ads, better technology, similiar prices.
What's the confusion?
I posted some of the screenie from the "members only" download link...
on byopvr
It's not as bad as I thought, but it's still not good...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Predictions of TiVo's death are greatly exaggerated, in my opinion. In my opinion, the banner adds while fast forwarding are a great idea.
Think about it, advertisers want a captive audience for their advertising. They pay for product placement in movies and TV shows because they know the audience is watching attentively. Not true for running commercials on radio and TV. People walk away for a bathroom break, to grab a snack, or any number of other things.
But if someone fast forwards through a commercial, advertisers know that you will be looking at the screen, because you want to stop fast forwarding before the show starts. You are a very captive audience, and you will be looking right at the advertising.
Users may not like the banner ads, especially as TiVo is currently testing them and working out any bugs. In the end though, the ads are an incredibly good thing for TiVo (the company.) As long as TiVo services, TiVo subscription service will continue, and new TiVo models and features will be introduced. Good for TiVo.
There is definitely more positive than negative with the new banner ads.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
>>I think it'll take a lot of people actually cancelling their subscriptions...
Count me in.
I've been preparing for this moment for the past several months. My MythTV box is waiting, ready-to-go, so the instant I see my first fast-forward advertisement I'm calling Tivo and telling them to cancel my subscription, effective immediately.
I guess I'll be checking my tivo recordings tonight, phone in hand.
This is ridiculous. I don't think it's outrageous to try to create ad revenue, but TiVo has been feature-frozen for years, essentially. No new innovation, same terrible interface for typing out words painfully through the infamous "ouija board screen," same awfully slow sorting algorithms, same ancient hardware, RAM limitations, lack of customizability....
And the "innovation" they come up with in 2005 is to find a way to spam us? Thanks, TiVo.
Currently hooked on AMP
But it looks like they seriously don't limit your max rentals per month.
I still have the feeling that they'll cut you off, or something if you're continously renting 60 dvd's per week.
rent disc
walk to car
place disc into laptop
rip to external hd
return disc, rinse, repeat
?????
profit!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!