Jeremy was disappointed to discover Comcast dropped banner ads onto his DVR this week:
I noticed I’d lost about 1/8th of my overall screen space to a new “advertisement slot.” Worse yet, I’ve lost 2 (of 6) lines of the visible grid area, meaning I have to spend roughly 1/3 longer than before just to scroll through channels.
Assuming he’s stuck with them, JT provides several interesting suggestions on how Comast (or is it Motorola?) might improve their ad-serving implementation. Until then, he wonders where that Comcast-Motorola-TiVo is… While he’ll get a better interface (one day), the ads won’t be going away:
make the TiVo(R) service and advertising capability widely available to Comcast customers
combine TiVo’s unmatched DVR features and innovative advertising capabilities with the power of Comcast’s advanced digital television services
TiVo and Comcast will make TiVo’s interactive advertising platform available across Comcast’s customer base
I’m more tolerant of ads these days… Believe it or not, TiVo and Comcast advertising methods are positively subtle compared to the screen real estate Microsoft wastes on my Xbox 360. (At least today’s ads are related to gaming!)
This has me totally pissed off and is going to drive me to spend a bunch of cash on either a MCE box with a cable card tuner or a series 3 much sooner then I had wanted to.
The worse thing about these totally intrusive banners is they make the guide less usable then it already was (which is saying something). When ever you move up or down with the arrows it catches on the stupid banner slowing scrolls and adding tracking problems to what is happening on the screen.
It dropped the WAF even lower then it already was for the over all experience, which ranked pretty low compared to our old direct TV HD tivo.
So my question is what kind of crack are Comcast exes smoking, they do know they are already charging me for the box and guide right? Do they really think they get to double dip like this with out driving away customers to their competitors?
First day it popped up I reached for the phone and started to call dish network but the wife asked to wait until we smoked through the current show list.
My god, the greed and stupidity.
x2 what fGriffon said. Those ads are horrible and a major deterrence to ease of use on the guide. I don’t mind ads but don’t place them where they impact the scroll. Tivo S3 – here I come.
get over it. use the channel up/down to scroll. damn. y’all are lame.