Alan Wexelblat @ Blogbook IP:

Copyfight, among others, has been tracking the varied zigs and zags of TiVO as that company tries to navigate the shark-infested waters of modern electronics. OK, those are [Copyright] Cartel lawyers, not sharks, but who can tell the difference?

Now it appears that TiVo has sold out entirely, but not to the Cartel. Instead, they've climbed into bed with a coalition of 30 big advertisers to implement a "feature" (and I use that word advisedly) that takes away your ability to skip ads. Instead of a simple forward jump, you get to have your commercials overlaid with... wait for it... commercials. But they're TiVo's commercials. Soooo much better.

According to the LA Times story linked above, these "tiverts" as I think I'll call them will pop up during fast-forwards, offering contest entries, giveaways or links to other ads. And of course, this is accompanied by a vast giveaway (well, technically it's probably a sale) of your personal information to the advertisers.

Even if you don't participate in this effort to get you to mainline commercialism, you'll still be part of an intensive "market research" effort in which TiVo will examine your viewing habits on a second-by-second basis (no, I'm not making that up) and then sell THAT data.

"The message we really want to get across," says Davina Kent, TiVo's advertising and research sales manager, "is that we now have a dedicated road map for advertising." It's completely unclear to me whether they have a dedicated roadmap for customer satisfaction.