TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings

I argued this in 2015:

> "...why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in..."

Here in France, some Internet+television providers have started implementing a new rule : you can't skip commercials on recorded shows.

It was entirely dictated by TV channels, in order to close the obvious "recording loophole" : instead of watching the show in their VOD app, you could record it, and obviously skip all commercials.

Now you can't anymore. There's even a small dialog when you try that tells you that "Due to a specific demand by <TV Channel>, skipping is a disabled feature."

It depends on their analysis. Companies are interested in profit and not loyalty or morality. If they have done their analysis and predicted that this decision will bring more profit, good for them.

Intuitively, without any analyses I predict the opposite will happen. But they may have real data supporting their decisions which I do not have.

I wonder how long technical protection measures will last in the era when everyone has an AI with a spectacular reverse-engineering capability. See the current MIDI piano thread.

At the very basic level you can have the AI spot when ads are playing and mute them for you. Used to be easily done with loudness and various other in-band signals.

Virgin Media cable user in the UK here.

I had their Tivo box until a couple of years ago when the forced an "upgrade". The new box has uch better hardware but the software was a leap backwards.

Regarding ads, on recorded programmes I can fast forward through them. It's not a direct skip but can jump +30 seconds at a time.

When viewing through any of the channel apps most of them used to allow skipping, but over the past few months it's now blocked on all of them I think. They do tell you how many adverts there are in each block and how long the one is, such as "2/10 29 seconds to go". Unfortunately they don't tell you the total length of the break, some sections are just a few seconds.

My parents still have a couple, but I think most people's reaction to this is "TiVo still exists?" CableCARDs are going extinct and there are lots of other options to record OTA these days.

I'm surprised there's an online component to that. I've never seen such a device in real life but I've always assumed that these have some sort of automatic commercial break recognition and that such features were first introduced way back in the 90s when requiring an internet connection was impractical to say the least.

I've been a heavy user of Tivo from 1999 to a couple years ago when I dropped cable TV. I have never heard of SkipMode. Is it something they just added? because "longest-standing and most popular DVR features" doesn't sound like it was just added.

Once again PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN (note this is from 2013, and while its origin is as a shitpost, it's prophetic)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

Reads like an onion article. I've gone to great lengths to avoid ads - but it's a war I am losing. Content is now interleaved with ads at the creative stage in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, this inexorable convolution occurs even on formerly alternative spaces. Let me pay, I want to pay, I'll pay a lot, just stay out of my fucking head.

Shocking! That TiVo still exists.

Stremio + Torrentio + Gluetun

Honestly I thought they disappeared 20 years ago.

The old dvrs were great for old pata hdd that you could individually RMA.

God I’m old.

This is a really good example of how capitalism doesn't work so well in a digital economy. Normally there is are various arguments about how the subscription pays for the development / invitation. But here we have a feature that's been there for more than a decade, the only innovation is figuring how to monetize it.

can't believe tivo is still around.

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> TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings

Deceptive and false title.

True title is: TiVo Plans to End Free Automatic Commercial Skipping in November, Tests Paid Premium Replacement Service