TiVo PC Could Be a Game-Changer

An anonymous reader sends in an article by Andrew Keen (author of "The Cult of the Amateur") about TiVo's new TiVo PC, which he believes could seal the fate of advertising on online videos. Just as TiVo let viewers zap commercials on broadcast TV, TiVo PC — a TV tuner that can be plugged into a PC — will let Net viewers of the likes of Hulu.com and ABC.com skip commercials in the nascent medium of online video. Keen believes that TiVo's business model involves (besides selling lots of $199 boxes) mining and selling the far richer stream of user behavioral data that TiVo PC will enable.

Comments

Wait a second

[Orleron]

If they mine data for behavior statistics, and they kill advertising.... what will they use the behavioral statistics for?
*scratches head*

Re:Wait a second

[mcgrew]

It won't kill advertising. My snailmailbox continually gets ads, some people look. It just means that advertisers are going to have to be less banal and annoying and more entertaining in their own right.

Nobody minds the Budweiser frog ads, or the Geico duck ads. hell, when one of those Budweiser ads comes on I'll wait until that ad is over before I go to get another Killian. The people making that "head on" commercials are in deep trouble with this, though.

Re:Wait a second

[An ominous Cow art]

It's sad, but some do. A co-worker uses IE, and her home page is MSN.com. It makes me physically ill to watch her start up her browser. I always make a big (semi-joking) deal about averting my eyes. She claims to like ads because they keep her "informed". Sigh...

Re:Wait a second

[lysergic.acid]

consumerism really has changed our society (for the worse IMO). economics has always been an essential, though not the dominant, component of anthropological studies. when we study the ancient greeks, romans, egyptians, etc. we learn about their culture through art, cultural literature, historic records, etc. and we learn about their lifestyle mostly through artifacts like pottery, statues, wall carvings, etc. but if future anthropologists want to learn about our society, they'll mostly just find advertisements. unless future archaeologists happen to come across the MOCA or Getty, the only culture they're going to find will have been produced by marketing/advertising agencies.

and this isn't just an issue of how we're going to look to future civilizations who are studying us. if most of the "culture" individuals are exposed to are advertisements and marketing campaigns to encourage consumption, then that's surely going to have a detrimental effect on our society. we're living in an age of advertising as culture. even the tv shows or films we watch for entertainment are filled with product placement. there's no longer such a thing as pure culture that wasn't created to manipulate people into buying a product.

Re:This isn't sustainable

[Hatta]

The existence of adblock hasn't caused the collapse of the web yet. If anything, giving the viewer power to view or not will encourage advertisers to make ads people want to see. I can only see this as an improvement.

Re:This isn't sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with Babbster, I can stand some commercials, but not 3 minutes worth of loud annoying crap. It seems 15-30 seconds of ads on online tv is fine with me. I would rather the short ad-break then to not have a legal alternative to broadcast tv.
yes I use adblock and every other form of ad blocking software because online ads are very annoying and I pay for bandwidth. I'm not paying for over the air tv (technically) so I understand their business model.

Re:This isn't sustainable

[Thelasko]

It doesn't lock you out. Or not me anyway. I get a message that says to disable my adblocking software, but the program shows up normally after 30 seconds.

I've had it lock me out, and I've also seen it shows a blank screen for 30 seconds (It does this on Windows). Either way, it penalizes you for using an ad-blocker. In fact, the commercials are shorter than the 30 seconds it penalizes you for using Ad-Block, making Ad-Block completely pointless on that site.

So I return to my point. How can TiVo get around these commercials and no one has made a Firefox Extension that can do the same thing?