I first heard about this a couple days ago, but delayed posting anything until I was sure it was true. Well, the rumors have now been confirmed by the company.

TiVo began testing interactive advertising tools during the weekend as it looks to appease companies wary of users’ ability to skip over ads.

The company confirmed late Monday that it released the first in a series of advertising features to a random and limited number of subscribers to the digital-video recorder service. The first test feature–a tag–pops up on the screen when a viewer is fast-forwarding through an advertisement.

If viewers press the thumbs-up or select button during the half second the tag is displayed, they will be redirected to a menu that leads to more information about the advertised product. The tag takes up about 25 percent of the screen, according to the company. TiVo said it is working with only one advertiser, a movie studio, on the trial balloon.

This smells of desperation. It’s yet another reason why once-loyal TiVo users, including myself, are turning elsewhere.

Of course, the undocumented 30-second skip feature would allow you to work around this annoyance. But because it’s undocumented and definitely unofficial, this shortcut could be disabled at any time.

Update: You can see a couple screen shots of these pop-up ads at the TiVo Community forum. (Via PVRBlog)

Mediaweek has a fascinating story on the possibility that cable companies could offer unlimited DVR capacity from a central location:

A report issued last week by Magna Global predicts that if network DVRs become a reality, DVR usage could skyrocket. Unlike set-top DVRs, which are already offered by several cable operators, a network DVR records virtually all programming on a central server in the cable system’s “headend.”

Theoretically, anybody who subscribes to digital cable could record whatever they wanted, without having to schedule an appointment with the cable guy or install a TiVo box.

According to Magna, network DVRs, if deployed this year, “would immediately make time-shifting technology available to 40 [percent] to 50 percent of a cable operator’s subscribers…significantly impacting how video content is consumed.” Magna Global’s director of industry analysis, Brian Wieser, who authored the report, said, “The possibility could be here a lot sooner than people think.”

In theory, this is a fascinating idea. Why should 10,000 users record Lost or Desperate Housewives on their individual hard drives when the service provider (cable or satellite) could store a single copy and serve it on demand? That would, again in theory, allow the service provider to preserve all the other content being broadcast at the same time as those hit programs, making it available for anyone to watch on demand.

In practice, I fear that some or all of the following would happen:

• Cable companies would start charging a premium for certain types of content.
• Cable companies would ignore unpopular programs, no matter how interesting, and focus only on the top 100, making the selection of programming even less diverse and more bland.
• A significant minority of content providers (yes, I’m looking at you, HBO) would object and file lawsuits to block the service completely.
• Someone would figure out a way to insert ads into the content (or in a bumper that plays before the program) that could not be skipped.
• The programs delivered to the customer would be “protected” with DRM, making it impossible to reuse them even in ways that have been traditionally acceptable under the fair use doctrine.

I’m not a Comcast subscriber, so I don’t know enough about the service, but apparently Comcast’s On Demand feature already offers at least some of this functionality.

(Via Lost Remote)

The new head of the FCC is not my friend. Or yours. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from this New York Times story, published today [emphasis added]:

Leading lawmakers and the new leader of the F.C.C. have proposed a broad expansion of indecency rules, which were significantly toughened just last year. They are also looking for significant increases in the size of fines and new procedures that could jeopardize the licenses of stations that repeatedly violate the rules.

Some senior lawmakers, including Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Republican who is the leader of the Commerce Committee, as well as Kevin J. Martin, the new chairman of the commission, have suggested it may be time to extend the indecency and profanity rules to cable and satellite television providers, which now account for viewership in 85 percent of the nation’s homes. And organizations opposing what they consider indecent programming have joined forces with consumer groups that have been trying to tighten regulation over the cable industry and force it to offer consumers less expensive packages of fewer stations, known as a la carte services.

Let’s be crystal-clear what’s going on here. This is the work of a fanatic named L. Brent Bozell, who hires an army of people to sit around all day watching television and cataloguing all the naughty bits they see. Bozell’s team then posts those naughty bits on his Web site alongside a complaint form. His legions of flying monkeys then send robo-complaints by the millions to the FCC over shows they never watched. Before Bozell’s organization existed, the FCC received a few hundred complaints a year. Today, his group is responsible for 99.8% of all “indecency” complaints. Media Week reported on December 6, 2004:

In an appearance before Congress in February … Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell laid some startling statistics on U.S. senators.

The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”

What Powell did not reveal — apparently because he was unaware — was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by [Brent Bozell’s] the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

Bozell is also founder of a group called the Media Research Center, one of the leading forces in trying to tear down the independent press in this country.

This is a dramatic overreach by the self-appointed mullahs who want to tell us what to think. Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told Salon earlier this month: “Religious and conservative groups campaigned for the elevation of Mr. Martin. They have succeeded in establishing a new ‘litmus’ test for the FCC chair –someone who will be at the forefront of monitoring programming.”

None of this stuff is very complicated. If you don’t want cable coming into your home, don’t subscribe. If you think the airwaves are filled with filth, turn off your TV, or throw it away. If you want to block particular channels, block them. It’s very easy. But don’t tell me what I can or can’t watch in the privacy of my own home.

And you know what? Americans overwhelmingly feel the way I do. This is not a grass-roots movement on behalf of the American people. It is a concerted campaign by a small number of fanatics who would prefer to rip up the Bill of Rights and replace it with a Code of Conduct.