A while back, TiVo started giving you something to look at while fast-forwarding through commercials -- more commercials. Apparently the ads are getting more sophisticated, now showing advertisements for the same product that is on-screen during the commercial. In theory, these ads are less obtrusive than the older ones, since they're only on-screen for a limited time, but if you bought a TiVo so that you'd never have to pay attention to a commercial again, they are a bit annoying.
The ads only pop up when you're fast-forwarding, so you can always get around them using the ole 30-second skip hack.
1. Actually, they always were ads for the same product you were FF over. That was one of TiVos rules for this feature. They didn't want to get into Pepsi buying billboard ads to run over a Coke ad, etc. That'd be a real mess. So vendors can only buy these for their own products, then they put flags in their ads that trigger them.
And from the photo you have there, it looks like it hasn't changed from when I saw them early on.
Posted at 4:57PM on Jan 15th 2007 by MegaZone