17 Nov 2004
TiVo Will No Longer Skip Past Advertisers (Los Angeles Times)

The way this article is written, it makes it sound as though Tivo had this planned all along, being naught but a tool to hook consumers into "TV Your Way" and then pull the rug out from under them after they've been snagged.

But a there's a telling paragraph later in the piece that sheds some light on Tivo's "evil" motives:

While competitor ReplayTV had allowed its subscribers to skip commercials entirely — TiVo restricted its fast-forward capabilities so viewers could still see the commercial, albeit eight times faster than intended. (ReplayTV last year was forced by litigious studios and networks to adopt a more TiVo-like system.)

It was fear of industry lawyers that made Tivo adopt this engineering standard, not the wishes of consumers. And it's that same fear that's now changing their marketing strategy - they're trying to make lemonade out of the lawyerly lemons the TV industry is handing them. I'm not sure they'll succeed:

"TiVo is dependent on a psychology," says Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg and author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "It is not just a technology. You don't want people to intrude in your life. That's the whole point of it — to give you control of that mechanism…. I think they're going to find themselves losing customers. I say this as a TiVo subscriber."

Los Angeles Times - When it debuted in 1999, TiVo revolutionized the TV experience by wresting control of screen time from advertisers, allowing viewers to record shows and skip commercials. TiVo's slogan said it all: "TV your way."

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

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