Advertising Comes to DVR Owners

bill_kress writes "According to Reuters, television studios are finally trying to target DVR viewers with advertising. The effort, however, seems rather backwards — They are extending the same exact image across the entire 30 second commercial so that TIVO Viewers will be forced to view at least one frame. Wouldn't it be better to add value to the viewing experience instead?" From the article: "The advert for its new drama 'Brotherhood' will show a single image on the screen for the entire 30-second slot, and therefore retain its "sales message" when viewed even at the 12-times speeds enabled by Sky+ and other digital recorders, also known as personal video recorders, or PVRs. Advertisers have been racing to find ways to get messages through as higher numbers of consumers watch TV programs when they want using such recorders, often skipping the commercials."

Comments

Their approach doesn't work against Mythtv!

[russ1337]

They are extending the same exact image across the entire 30 second commercial so that TIVO Viewers will be forced to view at least one frame.

Fortunately, this does not work against Mythtv - you can skip the entire ad's with one press: -All you see is the start of the show after the ads! The ad detection algorithm just got an overhaul with Googles-Summer-of-Code (they wrote another version), but i've always found the current one pretty good.

(I know your all gearing up to whine about how hard mythtv is to install,... then you probably havent tried Knoppmyth, or the Hyams Fantastic How-to )

Re:Go Go!

[amuro98]

Tivo calls it an "easter egg". I think Tivo wanted to make it a normal feature, but decided against it after the TV studios growled at them.

Anyways, it takes all of 10 seconds to enable the 30-sec. skip on your Tivo:

Just start playing a program, then hit:

[select] [>] [select] [3] [0] [select] If you did it right, it'll go "ding ding ding" and then the button that used to skip to the 15/30 tic marks, now just skips 30 seconds forward. The only downside to this is that if your Tivo reboots or loses power, you have to re-enter this code in again.

Re:Wow

[HTH NE1]

My Tivo has 60x fast forward... so advertisers will have a 1 in 2 chance of me seeing their single frame!

Only if TiVo showed 60x fast-forward updating at only 1 frame per second would that be true. In fact, at 60x speed, out of a 30-second commercial TiVo shows you 15 frames of it in half a second.

To see only one frame of a 30-second commercial without still-storing the frame longer than the standard 1/30th of a second, you'd need 900x speed.