These are anxious times for marketers, who are faced with commercial-busting technology that's evolving faster than they can keep up. Broadcast-ready cellphones, hyper-real video games, interactive DVDs and the Internet give consumers the on-demand, often commercial-free entertainment they crave.
Traditional network television viewing, by comparison, can seem antiquated. The number of American households with a TiVo or TiVo-like recording system is expected to increase from 5% to 41% in five years, according to Forrester Research, which studies technology's effect on business.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday November 19, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 53 words Type of Material: Correction
TiVo cost -- An article Wednesday in Section A about increased advertising on TiVo paraphrased Davina Kent, TiVo's advertising and research sales manager, as saying that increased advertising revenue probably will bring down the subscription price to consumers. Kent said the cost of advertising itself would go down, not the cost of subscriptions.
For this reason, ad agency executives who initially ignored TiVo and its digital video recorder technology, or DVR, are now praising it as an industry savior.
"I look at TiVo being first generation of the TV advertising of the future," says Tim Hanlon, a vice president at Starcom MediaVest Group, one of the world's largest media-buying companies, with clients including General Motors Corp., Procter & Gamble Co. and Best Buy Co. "There's a whole witch's brew of change coming to the linear television form."
But what about TiVo's devotees, those folks who send the company fan mail and photos of their pets posed with TiVo boxes, and act as missionaries, converting their friends to the technology?
Some say they don't mind a little pop-up advertising -- just so long as they can fast-forward through it -- because it could help keep TiVo in business. (A September report from Forrester shows that DVR owners typically fast-forward through 92% of commercials.)
Others are wary of the changes and concerned the company's priorities may be shifting away from the consumer.
"A company can get too big for its britches, you know?" says Bill Calogero, a Chicago computer business analyst and TiVo subscriber since 1999. "I just don't want them to interfere with the experience. If it isn't broke, don't fix it."
Yet from its inception, TiVo engineered its system with advertisers and networks in mind. While competitor ReplayTV had allowed its subscribers to skip commercials entirely -- TiVo restricted its fast-forward capabilities so viewers could still see the commercial, albeit eight times faster than intended. (ReplayTV last year was forced by litigious studios and networks to adopt a more TiVo-like system.)
