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

Wow

[CerebusUS]

Gee, that won't upset the standard viewing public at all... will it?

Maybe they could play an emergency test tone over the entire 30 seconds, just to get everyone's attention.

Re:Wow

[AxelBoldt]

There is no escaping them. What do we do?

Get yourself a library card and kill your TV.

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.

Re:Wow

[WilliamSChips]

Books are great but sometimes you just don't want to read. I don't know why that's so hard to understand for some people.

Go Go!

[RyanFenton]

Tivo: Go go gadget 30 second skip!

MythTV: Go go gadget commercial detection and skip!

Windows DVRs: Uh... Go go gadget DRM! Aw, crap!

Ryan Fenton

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.

Except for us MythTV owners!

[gameboyhippo]

I say "Bring it on!" If all advertisers did this, then it will be easier for my DVR to detect comercials so I don't have to see them at all!

When will it stop?

[Whammy666]

You just have to wonder just how dense the network executives really are. I wonder when it will finally sink in that saturating your programming with advertising to the point that the viewing audience revolts is ultimately counter-productive. They should take it as a clue that if viewers are willing to spend several hundred dollars to avoid ads using specialized hardware, there is something seriously wrong with your marketing plan.

Ads Targeting TiVo

[lpoulsen]

GE did something infinetely more intelligent a few months ago.
The last second of their ad was a set of single frames with interesting information. To see what was there, you had to repeatedly watch the ad until you managed to hit pause at just the right time so you could single-step through the hidden content.

That way, (at least some) TiVo owners ended up spending 15 minutes on a 30-second ad. Now THAT's creative!!

Wouldn't more interesting adds be the answer?

[AndyG314]

If I see a good, or interesting looking add I will stop to watch it. A great example of this is the add with Abe Lincon and a monkey playing jump rope. You can't just wizz by Abe Lincon and a monkey playing jump rope, you have to see what it's all about. Turnes out the add was for sleeping pills.

Same old, Same old

[suprcvic]

Isn't this how it always is though? When Cable TV first arrived it was touted as having no commercials and then they came. We used to have the luxury of not watching commercials at the movie theatre because we paid to be there, now we have to watch the same trailer for the same bad tv show over and over again while we wait for the movie to start. The "no commercials" idea is IMHO a bait and switch maneuver that for some reason always works on consumers. The ridiculous number of commercials is the main reason I don't watch tv anymore. There are some shows I might like to see, but I'm not willing to sit through all the commercials to see them. Of course, it doesn't help that most of the shows are bad shows with excessively overpaid actors which brings us back to the insane amount of commercials, they have to pay for the talent, or lack thereof.

The Spinal Tap Solution....

[lexsco]

.....PVR's that skip 31 Seconds.

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:Now this is just dumb

[kfg]

Bah, I'll just keep myself full of beer so that I don't understand the visual even if I see it.

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