"I want them to be successful," says Gary Beck of Long Beach, who bought his first TiVo in 1999 and now has three. "They have clawed their way up. As long as they're not giving out personal data, I don't mind."
Some observers, however, interpret TiVo's new ad campaign as a profound change in its ideology that won't sit well with devotees.
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.
Matt Haughey, whose Portland, Ore.-based PVRblog.com gets 10,000 hits a day (PVR is short for personal video recorder), says he wasn't surprised by the shift. After last year's lawsuit against ReplayTV and TiVo's hiring of NBC executive Martin Yudkovitz as president, he figured the glorious "David versus Goliath" days, when TiVo was the best defense against corporate tyranny, were numbered.
"My first impulse is, this is going to start the slippery slope," Haughey says.
"TiVo is dependent on a psychology," says Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg and author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "It is not just a technology. You don't want people to intrude in your life. That's the whole point of it -- to give you control of that mechanism.... I think they're going to find themselves losing customers. I say this as a TiVo subscriber."
To Syracuse University's Thompson, the concept of interactive advertising interrupts the most relaxing aspect of watching TV. "People seem to forget that what we've loved about television so dearly is its abject passivity," he says. "That's why they call it couch potato. TV was so great because it wasn't interactive."
But TiVo research suggests that notion is out-of-date. Between 5% and 20% of TiVo viewers given the opportunity to "participate" in an ad -- either by clicking on a tag or by selecting a long-form commercial from a main menu -- take it.
That's because TiVo has done its homework and knows its customer, Kent says. The new ads intrigue viewers instead of annoy them. They pop up and disappear in a matter of seconds if the viewer isn't interested. "You'll never see TiVo roll out any kind of intrusive advertising," Kent says. "It's very core to our mission."
What remains to be seen is whether consumers will embrace this culture shift at TiVo.
"Watching [an ad] is one thing," TiVo loyalist Calogero says. "Interacting with it is something that the consumer is going to need a little more reassurance that their information isn't being sold. I mean, TiVo knows how many times I rewinded to see Janet Jackson's breast come up. How much more do they know about me?"
