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"Icon" ads over commercials at TiVo

TiVo's support section has a new entry about the ads. The takeaway tip is that you can hit CLEAR to remove them from your screen.

I don't want to keep harping on this new feature, but I do want to return some nuance to this discussion by restating that I believe in all the screenshots I've seen, the ad is rough looking and obscuring too much of the screen. For the life of me, I can't figure out why TiVo would not put the ad down in a corner, perhaps taking up to 25% of the screen, wrapped around some TiVo OS chrome, so at least it looks like it should be there. The way the ads appear now, it almost looks like your TiVo has been hacked by an outsider. TiVo's UI and software engineers do some beautiful work, agonizing and testing each and every option, and customers are used to the friendly, eye-catching software, but this looks like something they were forbidden from working on.

Of all the screenshots I've seen, this one is my personal favorite for the worst possible interaction:

Nope, that doesn't obscure the show or degrade your ability to see what is going on at all. :)

Update: to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, I just took a photo of my TiVo during a blockbuster commercial, then mocked up a quick ad format from a screenshot of the blockbuster homepage. Compare this with the photo above and I hope you'll see what I'm trying to say about how these need to be integrated with TiVo's look and feel for customers not to feel they're being taken.

At least it looks like it was supposed to be there. Why won't TiVo at least make them look more like this?

by Matt Haughey March 29, 2005

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