So, tonight while watching 24 I fast forwarded through some commercials
(as one often does while anxiously waiting to see how Jack Bauer gets
out of whatever current FUBAR situation he’s in) and I noticed
something strange. In the middle of the screen there was a small square
ad (maybe 25% of the size of the screen) for a new movie with Nicole
Kidman. As I sped through the other commericials, this small ad stayed
in the middle of the screen.

I immediately recognized this as Tivo’s new ad system for displaying ads
while fastforwarding through the other commercials. (Never heard of
this? href="http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Tivo+banner+ads&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8"
target="_blank">Google to the rescue.) In theory, I’m fine with
this, really. I don’t care if there’s an ad there or not, if I can
still get to the content as quickly as I could before.

The second thing I noticed, after playing around a bit, is that the ad
is not only displayed during fastforwarding over commercials. It’s
displayed when fastforwarding or rewinding (er, that doesn’t
sound right w.r.t. Tivo) during the show content as well. That’s a
little less pleasant.

The third thing that came to mind was that if all the ads were to
feature Nicole Kidman, I probably won’t mind this feature. Here’s to
hoping…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 6:49 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.