aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, March 28, 2005

TiVo sold the fast forward button

Long rumored, it’s apparently here. From PVRBlog:

I’m still not sure what became of that planned feature, but Jeff Sprankle wrote in with a report of something similar happening on his TiVo:

This morning, I started watching Ghostbusters 2 on Comedy Central and, as I always do, paused it for a while so I could FF through commercials. At the first commercial, I used my trusty FF button only to see an ad for The Interpreter smack dab in the middle of the screen. Seems Tivo has started placing ads on your TV when you FF or RW live TV. To me, this is quite obnoxious because it takes up most of the TV screen!

UPDATE from Thomas Hawk:

This is incredibly short sighted for TiVo and will hurt them in the long run. Their advertising revenue represents such a minor amount of profit for the company. I can’t believe that they don’t see that this strategy will only hurt them in the end.

I couldn’t agree more!