Ad Searching With TiVo

You may use this content (better still, argue with me!), but please cite my ideas as © 2005, Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein. Best viewed in Firefox.

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There's a good article about TiVo's involvement with promoting television advertising by Jeremy Lockhorn at http://www.clickz.com/experts/ad/ad_tech/article.php/3567841 (retrieved 5 December 2005). Unfortunately, the author's love affair with TiVo seems to be losing steam, and I wonder how many other users are starting to feel the same way.

In addition to the concerns he expresses from other users, I've noticed that I can't seem to time the FF through commercials just right anymore. Maybe it's my diminishing reaction times, but I used to be able to FF into the first 10 seconds or so of a program after a commercial pod, and TiVo automatically rewound those 10 seconds to where the program actually returned from commercials (I may be off with the 10 seconds, but that's close). My 9-year-old daughter mastered it in no time.

Now I find I cannot time it just right, that I almost always end up going back too far and watch the end of the last commercial before the program returns. This is an annoyance, and it's not a good idea to annoy your customers, especially as fresh competitors come onto the scene. In addition, in at least an earlier rendition of the DishNetwork PVR, I could FF much faster than TiVo. This comes in handy if you want to skip through, say, an hour's worth of programming. Research, especially in library science, has consistently shown that we can put up with about 7-8 seconds of latency, and after that we start to get impatient (or, once again, annoyed).

It remains my strong belief that if you put the control of the programming in the hands of the viewer and give them the option of watching a commercial (or 2 or 3) in lieu of paying for the content, that's a bargain Americans are used to. I further believe that this has always limited the adoption and diffusion of pay-per-view television up to this point in our history.

You may use this content (better still, argue with me!), but please cite my ideas as © 2005, Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein. Best viewed in Firefox.

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