TiVo increasing on-screen ads, cable companies rejoice
Sometimes you just have to sit back and wonder what TiVo is thinking. Apparently the biz dev team there doesn’t think the unending onslaught of television commercials is enough to drive the average television watcher completely insane, so it seems to be doing everything it can to place ads over every last square inch of the TiVo UI. TiVo users may have thought that every possible screen was already laced with advertising banners but it looks like there’s at least one spot that hasn’t been covered yet - the pause screen. That’s right folks, now you can’t even escape TiVo’s ads when you pause your set. Great. For the time being, only Series 2 box owners get this extra little bit of spam to enjoy but Series 3 owners can expect it soon enough. So let’s see. TiVo upfront costs: $150 - $600. Typical cable company DVR upfront cost: $0. TiVo monthly cost: $13. Typical cable company DVR monthly cost: $7 - $10. TiVo: ads everywhere. Typical cable company DVR: minimal or even no ads. But hey, at least with TiVo you can order fast food without even having to reach for a phone…
Tags: Ads, Advertising, DVR, TiVo
some valid points, but can you upgrade your cable company DVR’s hard drive to a 1TB drive and add another 1TB eSATA drive?
How about using cablecards with mythtv?
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Wow, such TiVo hate. I have 2 TiVos and a cable DVR. For what I want to do, the TiVos win hands down. Why pay extra?
Watch movie or listen to music from my collection on my server? Check.
Transfer shows to my laptop or PMP? Check.
Schedule a show to record from elsewhere? Check.
Order pizza? Check.
My TiVo has the new update, and contrary to what the “screenshot” shows, it is only a thin green bar that says “Find more info about blah blah product.” And anyways, the show is paused. That means you are not watching it. Why does it matter if there is anything there or not. IIRC, it also goes away if you press clear.
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i love my tivo thank you very much
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I buy a product to remove ads, they feel the hurt (from advertisers), and put ads in the UI like some $30 shareware? Give me a fucking break, people. And to think you guys pay monthly for mini ads. I get all the ads I want for free on regular cable. Muhaha.
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I really don’t understand the whole popularity with TiVo…why again is it so much better than regular DVR?
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Actually, there are a variety of cable and satellite hard drive expansion options. Not 100% coverage, but Dish, DirecTV, some Scientific Atlanta cable boxes, etc. I here Verizon is looking at FiOS TV expansion options as well.
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@Jeremiah Duh - It’s better because it gives advertisers more routes to your eyeballs.
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Tivo’s for suckers.
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I ask this out of genuine ignorance, because I never owned a DVR: Exactly what do you get for the monthly fee? I don’t mind having to pay for the equipment, but why would I pay to keep using what I already bought? For whatever it costs to buy the machine, shouldn’t it automatically figure out when the shows are playing and record them?
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you forget that tivo still works with analog cable (analog - $15/mo vs digital $50/mo).
Cable companies force you to go to digital cable before obtaining a DVR.
Given that, I still receive HD (networks, abc/cbs/fox/etc..) signal over my analog cable network and can record on my hd tivo.
Given that, it’s a much cheaper option for me right now. Once analog cable becomes unavailable, I’ll gladly sell my tivo box or just toss it and move to a cable/satellite dvr box.
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My 2 Tivos are GREAT but my 2 Direct TV HD DVR’S are far superior to my Tivos, the Direct TV UI is the best UI on the planet (IMHO) and I get no unwanted ads on Direct TV either, when my TIVO’s die ill replace em with Direct TV DVR’S.
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Tivo over Comcast’s DVR box hands down. The menu’s in the Tivo are SO much easier to use/navigate. I gladly pay the extra few dollars a month to avoid a reluctant Comcast DVR. The Tivo actually records what I want to watch every time…unlike Comcast’s. The ads are minimal on screen and never bother me. It’s not like some blatant internet video ad before everything you do.
Also, here’s a great feature that’s an ad but the customer doesn’t see it as such. Let’s say your watching some recorded Fox show from prime time. If you actually happen to watch any commercial for another Fox show (lets say right before yours starts), a little icon comes up on the top right of the screen asking you to press the thumbs up button if you want to schedule a recording of it. Hit that button, tell it how long you wanna keep it, how much extra/less time you want it to record and you’re done. S.I.M.P.L.E. That would take about an hour on Comcast’s box. And Comcast’s box still probably record it because it doesn’t have the clip feature.
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You deserve to have those ads ruin your TiVo experience if all you’re watching is That 70’s Show. Yuck.
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There’s a reason people say “just TiVo it” when they mean record it. Tivo does it better, they do it right. Everything just works, kinda like what people say about Macs and Apple.
I’ve tried cable box DVR’s a few times and have promptly switched back to TIVO because the cable DVRs missed shows, were hard to use, and just came up lacking in every way.
Literally 2 weeks ago, I looked into moving to DirecTV and the AT&T UVerse. I compared all the prices to get the same things I have now (6 TVs, 3 Tivo, HD on one channel, Sports package).
With both of the other companies, I’d end up paying more for their service than I currently do for my HD Cable and 3 Tivo subscriptions. Only a couple dollars more, but still… not worth it to downgrade from Tivo to another service.
AT&T even offered to give me a $100 Visa Gift card if I switched.. I couldn’t justify it.
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It’s a blue bar* with some text above the timeline. No pictures, no video, nothing. It’s a line of text. On a button. It goes away when you press “Clear”, just like the timeline. Period. You don’t have to listen to it, or watch it, or even read it if you don’t want to.
And BTW, in my area, it only costs $1 more a month than the cable DVR and remote rental, and I can do a _lot_ more with it. See my post above. I didn’t even mention room-to-room viewing, and all the video podcasts that you can have downloaded automatically, among other things.
I like having control.
*I thought it was green, but I checked.
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You know there are a lot of T.V. ads that are pretty cool and I’d even go so far as to call some of em artistic but there’s a thin line between marketing genius and just plain annoying.
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I recently started noticing the blue bar above the timeline when pausing shows, but that’s not what’s going to get me to dump Tivo.
Lack of HD support for satellite customers is whats going to get me to dump Tivo.
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As long as late night soft-core porn is left alone I’m fine with it
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why do i need tivo or a dvr when i have torrents tversity plus an xbox360….
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I go with what RoseGold said, myself, but that’s neither here nor there.
Room-to-room viewing is something that can be done with FiOS. If it’s not available on Comcast already, I’m sure it will be before too long.
I only have one question about TiVo, however: does it record shows, or does it record time slots?
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@ RoseGold I agree
The annoyance over the ads is not because of how small it is but that it is there. Period. That’s like saying seeing ads on your building or national monuments are fine because you do not have to look or read it if you do not want to. While I personally do not care of ads, a lot of ad placements are really stupid because if you are already paying for an item then why be bombarded with such nonsense? If that’s what people wanted to be subjected to they would watch regular TV and not have TiVo or DVR, both of whose main selling points is the ability to skip commercials. So they make you skip other commercials and ads just to subject you to theirs? Makes no sense.
And contrary to what some might think the reason people say “just TiVo it” is not because it does it better. It is the same reason why people say ‘youtube it’ and ‘google it.’ Yes youtube will have practically every video on the planet but does it do it better than Hulu these days? No. And clustered search engines do a better job than google at finding exactly what you are looking for but they are not as popular as google. If they were I’m sure the phrase would be quite different, same with Tivo.
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There’s an underlying fact that everyone needs to consider: television in the United States is and always has been an advertising supported medium. With the exception of premium stations, your monthly cable bill is paying for the service and infrastructure, *not* the content.
Tivo’s convenience disrupts funding for programming, so they’ve come under a lot of pressure from content providers. Tivo’s had to develop alternate advertising platforms to appease the various networks/channels. Most, if not all, of the revenue derived from ads displayed by Tivo go to the content producers through revenue sharing agreements.
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BGR - Check your prices. Monthly Service for DVR by Comcast in Northern California is $15.95/mo - actually more expensive than Tivo
Trumani - Have you not seen the 3 million ads and news broadcasts about analog broadcasting going away in 2009?
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Rosegold - That sounds great as long as your torrents are all legal. However, it has been my experience (not claiming this is fact) that everyone I’ve seen that downloads torrents does both legally and illegally.
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Mykie - Read up on Tivo’s remarriage with DirecTV. They will be producing an HD Tivo to support DirecTv, launching in Q3 2009
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