Hate TV ads? Too bad! You're gonna watch 'em anyway

AnchorDesk

Hate TV ads? Too bad! You're gonna watch 'em anyway

John Morris and Josh Taylor
Contributing Editors, AnchorDesk
Tuesday, June 4, 2002

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Were we the only ones who were simply shocked by the front-page story in The New York Times a couple of weeks back--the one that unearthed the major news that owners of digital video recorders, like TiVo, are frequently skipping commercials? I mean, who knew that TV watchers would, if given the opportunity, choose to not watch ads?

If you're a frequent reader of our column, you're probably aware that even we knew that sooner or later the networks would begin experimenting with ways to exploit DVR technology, or at the very least, to develop ways to compensate for diminished ad revenues. That is, if efforts to first kill the technology outright don't work.

SO WE REALLY weren't that surprised--and certainly not as horrified as our colleague, David Coursey--to learn that TiVo users in the UK had recently been the recipients of what appears to be the first instance of TV spam. TiVo had struck a deal with the BBC to automatically distribute a sitcom called Dossa and Joe to all users, unless they had already programmed their DVRs to record another show during the same time slot.

(We have to admit this would bother us a whole lot more if they pushed something like The Bachelor, but we're thinking we could impress company if they chose to put something like Masterpiece Theater on our DVRs.)

But to us, TiVo's experimentation, which the company says is so far limited to the UK, is really just the next logical step for both DVR providers and the entertainment industry. (Remember: The UK is a country where moviegoers are subjected to more than 20 minutes of commercials before the coming attractions, yet continue to show up on time even though they have reserved seats).

Networks need to pay their bills somehow, and if people are skipping over commercials and watching their favorite shows whenever they feel like it (so-called "time-shifting"), then they're going to have to get creative. Millions of people are happy paying HBO $12.95 a month, which helps subsidize programming like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. But NBC doesn't get a dime from viewers who tune in to The West Wing. Instead, advertisers are helping to pay.

IF ENOUGH PEOPLE with DVRs change their viewing habits and advertising starts to dry up, are you willing to send NBC a check for $10 a month? We didn't think so, which means you're probably going to need to accept some new forms of advertising and pushed programming, some of it more invasive than others.

First off, expect more networks to try and build bigger audiences for their programs by partnering with TiVo and other DVR service providers like Sonicblue's ReplayTV and Microsoft's UltimateTV. We bet they'll make deals to "push" their programs to as many users as possible, and hope that not every last one of them skips over the ads. ReplayTV already shows ads when you pause a program during playback, and we wouldn't be surprised to see this become standard practice for all DVR services before long.

We also expect to see lots more product placement, which Survivor has already been taking to new limits. It won't be long before we see The West Wing's President Bartlett shaving with his new, improved Mach3 Turbo, before he throws on new Gap khakis.

Now, this isn't to say that the folks at TiVo didn't make some serious blunders in their experimentation. First of all, they didn't give their users any advance warning that the show would pop up on their devices. And second, there was no way to delete the show--rather, it would be deleted automatically after four days. TiVo says the show was saved to a separate partition of the device's hard disk that's allocated for things like the operating system and program guide, so it shouldn't have taken up space that a user could have allocated for another program. But it still seems a bit heavy-handed. And why are they wasting so much disk space on a partition subscribers can't access?

BUT TIVO COULD make good fairly easily. First, the company should send out a message to all subscribers, alerting them to the service change and giving them the ability to opt out of all future unsolicited pushed programs. Next, they should allow users to delete the shows whenever they want. They paid for the hard drive, so they ought to be able to do whatever they want with it.

Of course, if we were running ReplayTV right now, we would take full advantage of TiVo's PR blunders. And since ReplayTV is already positioning itself as the viewer-friendly DVR service, this shouldn't be too hard to do. After all, ReplayTV (along with DVR also-ran UltimateTV) still includes a commercial-skip function, which the more network-friendly TiVo scrapped long ago.

But in the long run, we expect that whichever company comes out on top in the DVR battle will be the one which figures out how to satisfy both the networks and its customers. And that remains one hard nut to crack.

What would you be willing to put up with? Extensive product placement? Commercials on paused screens? Pushed programming? Or would you rather pay for programming from the networks? TalkBack to us!

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