by Jose Alvear
According to PVRWire, Tivo is now flashing ads when users fast forward through commercials! For now, it seems the ad is for the same product that you’re fast forwarding, but conceivably Tivo can sell ads from other companies.
Fortunately, those of us with 30-second skip hack can safely bypass these commercials within a commercial.
So now there are even more ways to see ads on Tivo. Let me count the ways:
When a show ends, Tivo displays an ad on the “Delete This” screen. It’s just a one-line “text ad” which you can choose to watch a commercial. I’ve only seen these a few times. Here’s a picture of an ad for Sony HDTVs:

When watching a commercial, Tivo displays a green “thumbs up” on the screen so you can watch, er, well, an even longer commercial. I watched one the other day from Volvo. You have the option to watch a commercial, then it goes right back to where you left off: the commercial you were trying to skip.
Tivo also displays ads in the Tivo Central main menu. They have a yellow star next to the menu item, I guess so you know that it’s a commercial. I watched a few ads, including a five minute ad last night about Puerto Rico, and boy was it about four and a half minutes too long.
And now when you fast forward, Tivo displays an ad. Check out the screen grab at PVRWire.
Gizmodo is saying that Tivo should drop the monthly subscription fees altogether. I totally agree! Now that Tivo is heavily into advertising, why should the users have to pay to be subjected to commercials that we want to skip?
Tivo, DVR, PVR, digital video recorder, advertising
January 22nd, 2007 at 12:20 pm
[…] Jose at All PVR opens up discussion about TiVo adding ads to the fast-forward function on their machines. Do you have a TiVo? What do you think about this? […]