Friday, November 19, 2004

TiVo responds to marketing during fast forwarding

According to this post on Engadget, TiVo's marketing department posted to the TiVo community boards about their plan to market during fast-forwarding.  From the post:

. . . the marketing person wants to make it clear that the ads will not be full-screen and that they’ll be similar to the “thumbs-up” you sometimes see during commercials right now that’ll ask you whether you want to record a TV show.

In my opinion, the size of the ads simply do not matter; the fundamental problem, and I am echoing the words of the Engadget editor here, is the fact that TiVo users have to pay a monthly or lifetime fee for the TiVo service.  I would be a lot more open to this if TiVo were using the advertising revenues to subsidize the monthly service and equipment fees to enable to TiVo to provide their service and equipment free to me as the consumer.  Again from the post:

It’s like if we started having to listen to a little ad every time we wanted to check the voicemail on our cellphone—it’d be one thing if they were giving away the service for free, but we’re paying for this, you know?

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