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"Unhappy user Haughey" on NPR

Earlier today I was interviewed by an NPR show called Marketplace, for a segment on recent TiVo news such as the new ads and the macrovision change. TiVo head of legal Matthew Zinn and I got a few quick quotes. Here's the ~90 second segment:

NPR on TiVo (1.5Mb, MP3 file)

As with all these radio things I do, a ten minute balanced, nuanced conversation becomes one or two quick cuts to fit the story, but it wasn't too bad in this case.

I've been reserving final judgment on the ads until I got to see them. Well, someone at TiVo did finally show me some screenshots of the ads in action, but I was sworn to secrecy and can't display them here. Suffice to say that I was expecting something really subtle in the tivo UI but they looked very beta and looked like someone slapped a giant jpg of an ad poster over a quarter of the screen. They're also showing up in different spots, so you won't be able to tune them out by ignoring one section. But again, that's just in the early beta.

Another blogger connected the dots with a recent post by Mark Cuban. Last month, Cuban noticed  that when you FF is the only time you pay 100% attention to your TV and offered the idea of putting ads there as a freebie to anyone that wanted to act on it. Now, features probably have a very long cycle between idea, testing, and final execution at TiVo, but it's funny that Cuban's idea was floated a month before a rough beta of what he proposed ended up in testing.

by Matt Haughey November 17, 2004 in News

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