Just when you thought you couldn’t get any more annoyed by TiVo’s plastering of ads on virtually every part of your screen, just when you thought there was no more real estate left to bombard you with crappy spam the hammer drops.
Hope you don’t like to use the “pause” feature.
Using the TiVo Pause Menu, advertisers can, for the first time, reach audiences with targeted product messages displayed within the pause screen of a Live or Timeshifted program. The feature provides an original solution for advertisers seeking to capture the fast-forwarding viewer. It’s another example of how TiVo offers unique and different solutions for advertisers looking to get viewers to watch advertisements.
What with TiVo hemorrhaging subscribers like they had the plague, you’d think they would be a little more concerned with their customer’s user experience. It’s hard to tell which came first though, the chicken or the egg. Are the ads to replace lost subscribers or did subscribers leave because the ads were so fucking annoying.
TiVo released its third quarter results today, and while the company reported a profit (thank you, EchoStar for that $105 million patent violation payment) the DVR maker lost 163,000 subscribers, dragging its total number of subscribers down to 3.46 million — the lowest it’s been since the spring of 2005.
TiVo’s DVRs sell for $149.99 to $599.99 and after you buy a box you have to shell out $13 more every month just for the service, that’s all on top of whatever your normal cable bill is.
Imagine paying good money for a nice watch and then every time you checked to see what time it was the background of your watch was an ad for shaving cream or your local chiropractor. It would feel pretty shitty wouldn’t it?
Cable company DVRs do exactly the same thing as a TiVo with low monthly costs for the box and a much lower monthly rate for the service, not to mention they don’t spam your screen real estate with ads everywhere.
I have for quite a while been contemplating getting a TiVo to replace my cable company’s DVR. This information makes it much easier to stay with what I got. Now instead of a TiVo my next investment will be a BluRay player.
