Tivo - skipping ahead to the ads.

Finally the true potential of TiVo is being realised as the Wall Street Journal reports that one can now skip to the commercials, rather than past them. Sadly, this feature called "Product Watch" won't be airing the regular ad offering.

For the most part, the marketers won't run traditional 30-second TV commercials. Instead, they will offer longer ads that attempt to be more informative than typical commercials. Kraft, for instance, will offer 20 different cooking videos that will show such things as how to grill its Tombstone pizza, potato-salad basics, or how to create a cantaloupe-and-Jell-O dessert.

"JupiterResearch released a study that found more than half of digital video recorder (DVR) subscribers skip commercials, which is potentially costing the TV industry billions of ad dollars.
The research company estimates that the total TV advertising market for 2006 is estimated at $74 billion. The ad-skipping habits of DVR consumers, according to Jupiter, is putting $8 billion in cable and broadcast TV ad revenue at risk this year.
"Current efforts by certain networks to charge for primetime reruns via DVR technology do little to boost revenue and almost serve to penalize DVR users, who forgot to properly program their unit. The $8 billion segment of cable- and broadcast-TV advertising revenues potentially at risk due to DVR commercial skipping is not a foregone conclusion, but reworking ads to leverage the unique DVR experience could open new avenues of creativity and relationships with viewers," says JupiterKagan Inc. President David Schatsky.