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

[eln]

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

Online dating. Everyone always assumed TiVo wanted to collect all this data for marketing purposes, but actually they're just really, really lonely.

Re:Wait a second

[Enry]

Product placement, advertising in other media (print, radio, internet), and more targeted advertising.

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

[Ethanol-fueled]

Heh, it dosen't take marketing statistics to show that


PEOPLE DON'T WANT ADS SHOVED IN THEIR FACES!

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

[squiggleslash]

or the Geico duck ads

Somewhere in the world, at two difference advertising agencies, two overpaid campaign managers are explaining to their bosses how ads for car insurance and for supplementary health insurance could have been confused like that.

Thank you.

Re:Wait a second

[SensitiveMale]

The people making that "head on" commercials are in deep trouble with this, though.

But you remembered the "head on" ad so it worked. :)

Re:Wait a second

[Chyeld]

It's true I don't want ads shoved in my face, but on the other side of the coin, I often visit the Apple trailers site and watch odd or funny ads on YouTube and their ilk.

It's not the ads that I mind as much as their presentation. The last time I visited my folks we watched a PAY PER VIEW movie on dish. Every 5-10 minutes the show was interupted for the same effing, stupid, Bounty commerical.

It made me want to go home and research Bounty and it's parent companies simply to ensure I never bought anything of theirs again.

Re:Wait a second

[rs79]

She claims to like ads because they keep her "informed"

They do. When you stop seeing ads for luxury goods, it means something. Ads are a reflection of the culture at the moment.

I don't like them and even wish they'd go away but I can understand how poeple
would be interested in reading them. I do enjoy reading ads from, say 100 years
ago; some peoples thresholds are different - they like newer ads too for some
definition of newer.

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:Wait a second

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

or the Geico duck ads

Somewhere in the world, at two difference advertising agencies, two overpaid campaign managers are explaining to their bosses how ads for car insurance and for supplementary health insurance could have been confused like that.

Thank you.

I thought that too, and was about to make a +5 insightful comment about how all the advertisements are getting us to remember them through the amusing stories they tell... how we remember the ads, but not the products anymore.

Then I saved myself from looking silly by finding this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC0k8iJ-ZOg

This isn't sustainable

[bendodge]

Game changer? More like a game-trasher. I purposely do not block text or image ads (only flash) on websites because I know why they are there. Ads exist in video and websites to fund the content. If everyone blocks ads in video sites, the video sites will simply go away. TiVo does not have a sustainable business model here.

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

[WamBam]

I like Hulu enough to sit through 30 seconds of advertising which I think is a fair trade for the programming they offer. I just can't think of a reason why I should spend $199 for a device that will eliminate 2 minutes of commercials.

TIVO was a great replacement for a VCR and no doubt had a hand in pushing 'on demand' content on to the web as well as through our cable boxes, game systems and so forth. But now that they created a market that they no longer have exclusivity over, it seems that this new device is some sort of half-assed effort to get back into the game.

Re:This isn't sustainable

[Babbster]

I like Hulu enough to sit through 30 seconds of advertising which I think is a fair trade for the programming they offer.

Seriously. How commercial-intolerant would one have to be in order to get annoyed with Hulu's commercials? If network TV had that level of advertising, I'd never skip a comercial again, even with convenient 15/30-second skip buttons. I'll go further, in fact. For a 40- to 50-minute program, I'll take a full five minutes of commercials, perhaps one minute for every ten minutes of content. Sponsors willing to participate in that could expect me to give them significant consideration when I'm making purchasing decisions.

Re:This isn't sustainable

[Profane MuthaFucka]

At 50 bucks an hour, you'd have to eliminate almost 4 hours of commercials to come out ahead in terms of opportunity cost for your time. 240 minutes of commercials.

If the device eliminates 2 minutes of commercials, it would have to do that just 120 times to pay for itself. Why would you NOT buy the TiVo device.

Re:This isn't sustainable

[HTH NE1]

How commercial-intolerant would one have to be in order to get annoyed with Hulu's commercials?

How much variety is there in Hulu's commercials? Will I see a repeated commercial in one hour of viewing? In three hours?

And will I see commercials I haven't been exposed to dozens of times in the last week on regular television?

Do they advertise Hulu on Hulu?

Re:This isn't sustainable

[mattack2]

1) because you get the Tivo interface
2) reviews have said that you can transfer the recordings to other Tivos, so it integrates just like any other standalone Tivo.

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?

Re:This isn't sustainable

[prockcore]

you're paying for the delivery system, not the content.

That's like saying there shouldn't be ads on the internet because you pay for broadband.

No answers.

[Aladrin]

TFA asks a lot of questions but provides no answers whatsoever.

Personally, I doubt Hulu is going to let Tivo access their service and then skip the commercials unless Tivo is paying them every time a user does that. It would be suicide for Hulu.

ABC, NBC, etc etc are all in the same boat, except that it's not suicide and merely stupid for them.

I also doubt that user viewing preferences matters at all in an environment that can skip commercials. Unless they are looking for the demographic that won't watch the commercials no matter what... I can't imagine what use that data is.

Re:No answers.

[speroni]

I doubt Hulu is going to have a say in the matter. I imagine a system where you set TiVo to record the video from your PC instead of from your cable box, then allows you to fast forward at your leisure.

Something where the output is recorded not so much downloaded onto the tivo.

Why?

[neokushan]

TV tuners are by no means anything new, the only difference this really has is that it has the TiVo name. I dare say that most people who want to plug a tuner into their PC already know this and can probably install software that does everything this does, except for free.
I can't see it changing anything, as far as I'm aware, there isn't a teribly big market for TV tuners (there's a market all right, but it's nowhere near as big as say graphics cards or even sound cards, I'd bet - most people simply don't like being hunched over their monitor to watch TV and those that want to watch it on their actual TV would be better off with a standard TiVo box, or similar, anyway).

Re:Why?

[mongoose(!no)]

You're missing the power of the brand. I've got a TV tuner in my PC, and when I record things, the best way to explain it to people is "like a TiVo, but on my computer". It's not terribly simple, especially on a college campus where the TV lineup isn't as straight forward as entering your cable company and zip code.

If TiVo makes the TV tuner work really well, I imagine they could capture a good bit of the market. I imagine people could care less who makes their graphics card, but if they see "TiVo, but for my PC", it might make them think about getting one.

wtf?

[JustinOpinion]

This article seems nonsensical to me.

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.

What? Why do I need a TiVo TV Tuner box to watch online videos? Stripping commercials from online streaming video sounds like a software task. And saving the streaming video so that you can jump past the commercials doesn't require any special TiVo magic (whether hardware, subscription, or software). Will we see software and utilities that allow you to skip ads on online video? Probably. But what does this have to do with a TV-Tuner card for your PC?

The article also asks some nonsensical questions:

Does the arrival of the TiVo PC set-top box represent the final convergence of television and Internet video?

No. TV-Tuner cards and online video have existed for awhile. I don't see how a TiVo box changes anything. Yes, it might make "TV on your computer" more accessible to the masses... but that isn't a "final convergence" of anything, really. Sure, the lines are blurring between TV and Internet. And TiVo is part of that inevitable change. But this box isn't a revolution.

What will be the impact of TiVo's new device on the online video economy?

None. It's a TV-Tuner card, isn't it? (People watch Hulu because they don't want to pay for the equivalent cable channels.)

Will TiVo be remembered as the company that helped slaughter the advertising golden goose that has enriched the broadcasting industry for the last 50 years?

Doubtful. TiVo hasn't demolished TV ads yet. Strangely, PVRs in general haven't either. And AdBlock hasn't demolished web ads. These are all part of the arms race which keep ads sufficiently non-annoying that a sizeable fraction of the population doesn't bother avoiding. There will always be people who avoid them. But most people don't bother.

Add to this the fact that part of TiVo's strategy is to deliver ads to customers somehow... I hardly think that this new box changes much for the ad industry.

Zap hulu commercials?

[Hoplite3]

No no no, no one needs to zap hulu commercials. I mean it'd be nice, but not $199 nice. Current hulu advertising breaks are quite short an bearable.

What tivo COULD do is provide a couch-based way of using hulu, with an alternate UI that's remote control friendly. Make it work for youtube, and it'd be a good back-up plan at parties, where guests could show "teh internet funnah" to others around on the TV with minimal fuss.

But xbox 360 and that other netflix movie watcher box are going in this direction too. Market is going to be crowded. That's good for me!

Author an Idiot!

[jdc180]

The Tivo Software for the PC is simply a reproduction of the Tivo software in the tivo boxes that works on your Windows PC. It's not going to allow you to skip or record online videos, it will allow you to skip and record TV.

Keen Seems to Misunderstand Tivo PC

[OG]

He seems to believe that Tivo PC is a method of accessing online content, but it's not. If you have a TV tuner card in your PC, it lets you use the Tivo software with that card. That's all.

There's nothing you can do with this new product that you can't already do with MythTV or similar products. People who are going to save programs, edit out commercials, and post the final product up on the web are already doing it. This won't facilitate such behavior.

Keen doesn't seem to have a clue as to what this product actually does.

Troll alert

[CSMatt]

For those unaware of who this is, this is the guy who compared user-generated content to communism.

I'm not kidding.

Re:Troll alert

[BruceCage]

Ah yes, the guy who wrote the book titled "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture" or the full subtitle of "How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values".

Some more great quotes from Andrew Keen in an interview with Paula Newton on CNN.

"I think we've got to learn to read and listen to professionals rather than ourselves, because ultimately they're the ones who are experts, they're the ones who know how to collect the news, they're the ones who know how to make great music and compelling movies not ourselves. "

"The beauty of mainstream media is that you have editors, you have gatekeepers, who are relatively objective, who are professional, who ensure that the majority of the news is unbiased."

Perhaps one of these days I'll actually read into this guy some more under the guise of "Know Thy Enemy", but at the moment I have better things to do with my time.

He's also given a talk at Google by the way.