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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.
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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
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
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
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."
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drew
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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
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.
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
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!