Ahh, this is what TiVo subscribers want: more ads. That's presumably the assumption behind an effort announced today by the PVR company to partner with advertising agencies on a plan to let users search commercials on their PVR boxes by spring 2006.I suppose if you're really bored you might use the new service to search for commercials grouped by topic. You can set up a profile of categories or search terms you're interested in, and TiVo will either download the commercials by broadband or send them over broadcast TV, as it does now with commercials.
According to The Wall Street Journal, advertisers may be able to bid on keywords and categories they want to be associated with, a la Google. "The Google model is something we're reviewing," says Davina Kent, TiVo's vice president for national advertising sales.
I think this might work if the commercials are very information-centric, rather than content empty, as so many ads are on TV. You'll need to get specific information about something you're interested in before you'll turn over your TiVo to Madison Avenue.
Perhaps some tutorials or similar forms of advertising will work. If you think you're watching an ad, I don't think there'll be much interest by TiVo subscribers.
1. Maybe I'm in the minority then but this sounds interesting to me.
Since I became a TiVo user 2 1/2 years ago I certianly spend less time wathing commercials but I pay more attention to them than I did before.
On a regular basis while fast forwarding I find my eye caught by a commercial and actually rewind to watch it in real time.
The commercials need to be either entertaining or interesting, perferably both. Your average mortgage commercial isn't going to cut it (I really could care less who lost another one to whom) but a well designed ad for something I may be interesting in will.
I could definitely see myself using this feature, though I'm not sure how the content delivery would work. Would it simply index the ads present on the recordings on your TiVo (easy enough, TiVo just marks the ads it sees as you record the shows) or is this a special ad secion ALA the yellow star ads. I certianly wouldn't want to donate mush extra hard drive space for these ads.
Posted at 4:37PM on Nov 28th 2005 by Robert Aitchison