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Tivo ads in the wild?

Last fall TiVo users (myself included) raised a bit of a ruckus over the reported beta test feature of ads superimposed and added by TiVo when you hit fast forward. I'm still not sure what became of that planned feature, but Jeff Sprankle wrote in with a report of something similar happening on his TiVo:

This morning, I started watching Ghostbusters 2 on Comedy Central and, as I always do, paused it for a while so I could FF through commercials.  At the first commercial, I used my trusty FF button only to see an ad for The Interpreter smack dab in the middle of the screen.  Seems Tivo has started placing ads on your TV when you FF or RW live TV.  To me, this is quite obnoxious because it takes up most of the TV screen!

There was no new message about a code update so this seems like a sneaky little add-on.  Looks like I'm going to have to send that letter to Mike Ramsey that I wrote when I first heard rumors about this!

Without some photos and screenshots, it's tough to tell if this is an isolated incident or the start of the feature getting out to users. Some folks on the TiVo Community boards are reporting the same thing, so I'll keep an eye out for any screenshots of this feature in action. Until then, consider it unverified, but I await anyone experiencing it to post a photo of it as proof.

by Matt Haughey March 26, 2005 in TiVo

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