Watch a commercial while fast-forwarding through commercials

Posted Jan 15th 2007 2:30PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Advertising, TiVo

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.

Reader Comments

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1. My mistake. I haven't had a TiVo in the house for a while now, so when I read this blog entry about how TiVo's brought these ads back, I thought it meant they had been gone.

Posted at 4:41PM on Jan 15th 2007 by Brad Linder

2. 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

3. Heh, I like how the software puts the comments up in the order confirmed and not the order made, so your reply is before my comment. ;-)

Posted at 5:01PM on Jan 15th 2007 by MegaZone

4. @MegaZone

Are you sure about that? I seem to remember the old ads being shown throughout the entire commercial break?

Posted at 7:47AM on Jan 16th 2007 by Josh

5. Josh,

The ads were always meant to only appear over the ad for the same product.

When first rolled out there were glitches reported where the ad would pop-up - but then not go away when it was supposed to. Basically the 'end' flag was missed. Sometimes they persisted into the program itself. But I believe that's been fixed for a while now.

Posted at 4:58PM on Jan 16th 2007 by MegaZone

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