Google and TiVo team up, strike terror into the nonexistent hearts of TV execs

Seach and TV/online ad behemoth Google today announced an agreement to subscribe to TiVo's user data. "Here's where the fear and loathing come in. Google promises that advertisers pay only when their ads are seen. But TiVo lets viewers fast-forward through commercials. Now, with TiVo's data, collected from millions of digital video recorders across the country, Google can tell exactly which of those commercials are being bypassed."

• [Anonymous]

  #2
  I feel this way about TV and the Internet. However my three year old is captivated by ads of all kinds. I try to point out that they are trying to sell us whatever, or that somebody wants to take our money. I hope it works, because her buying into advertising seriously worries me.

• [mechko]

  My professor has repeatedly said: “If someone want’s to show an ad for something I want, I’ll happily watch it. If you’re going to store all my personal information, at least try and sell me things that I want!”

• [Anonymous]

  Actually, I think that’s a good thing: it tells the advertisers to make better ads, one’s that I might actually be willing to watch. Hopefully it’ll kill all the horrible, annoying ones…

• [Anonymous]

  Ad skipping isn’t as prevalent as you would think. Further, this is nothing new. Several companies have been offering this data for a few years now. Google is actually really late to this game. Further, they aren’t making inroads with the programmers who are all wary of GOOG after they dumped their print and radio ad programs.

• [Omir the Storyteller]

  In my case, that would be pretty much all of them, which IMO is one of the points of having a TiVo.

• [Anonymous]

  There is an argument that advertising is partly a social contract which we used to acceded to blindly, but now we have the ability to ignore, we do so enough, to have de-facto broken it: if we don’t watch the adverts, what is going to pay for free-to-air TV?

  I don’t like ads. So I don’t write this, as one who actually watches them (I have a PVR too) But, it would be silly to pretend there is no implicit or explicit downside risk in our decision to skip.

  Google just expose this a little more *concretely* perhaps?

  • [Omir the Storyteller]

    I’m sorry but I don’t buy the idea that advertising is a social contract. My feeling is that advertisers pay for ad space on a TV show to gain potential access to the people who are watching it. Whether or not we grant that access is up to us. For all they know there are any of a dozen reasons why someone might not watch an ad. They might be out of the room getting a sandwich or going to the bathroom. The TV might be playing to an empty room because the kids turned on the TV and then left after the cartoons were over (mine are especially bad about this). The viewer might be closing their eyes, covering their ears with their hands and singing LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU for four minutes between program content for all they know.

• [oasisob1]

  “Now, with TiVo’s data, collected from millions of digital video recorders across the country, Google can tell exactly which of those commercials are being bypassed.”

  I can tell you right now which ones are being bypassed, for free: all of them.

• [wispsmoke]

  The ads that continue being played, meanwhile, are not watched. If an ad on a DVR is not fast-forwarded, it means nobody is paying attention, anyway.

  • [arkizzle / Moderator]

    “If an ad on a DVR is not fast-forwarded, it means nobody is paying attention, anyway.”

    +1 Incisive

• [Steve Stair]

  On a TiVo, you can set a button to skip forward 30 seconds. Which mean you just press it 5 times, and the commercials are skipped.

  On my cable company DVR, I have to actually watch for the end of the commercials while I’m fast-forwarding. Maybe they should start making commercials where some text stays in the same spot for the duration of the commercial, so it is on the screen long enough to register to someone fast-forwarding.