TiVo We Need To Talk - It’s Time To Take Our Relationship To The Next Level

July 28th, 2006 Davis Posted in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TiVo |

TiVo recently announced that they were going to start selling second by second usuage information about a sample of their user base to advertisers, in an attempt to help marketers get a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in their ads. Some have expressed some concern over the practice and see it as TiVo planning on tattling on users who might be failing to live up to the social contract of advertisement sponsored TV, but the truth of the matter is that TiVo is restricting this program to anonymous aggregate information and the end result of this data should help marketers to create more effective advertisments. While not everybody is 100% comfortable with the solution, including advertisers, I’m very comfortable with TiVo using this data to improve my television viewing experience.

In looking at the coverage of this program, I’ve found that MediaPost seems to have understood the potential better then anyone to date. In an article discussing how this data might be used, Max Kalehoff writes

“The reality is that TiVo’s customer base of 4.4 million household subscribers represents a highly biased, yet valuable and elusive sample. As a market researcher who spends long days uncovering trends in online discussions among passionate affinity groups, I view the TiVo customer base as a goldmine of consumer insights that media and marketing execs should drool over. Industry execs should put aside the short-term ad-skipping issues (at least for a few seconds), and embrace this fervent community for all it’s worth!”

It’s true, I’m biased, frankly TiVo could do just about anything and I’d probably still love them even more for it, but one thing about this program that I don’t love is that it doesn’t go far enough. Now normally I’m the biggest privacy nut out there. I don’t want anyone knowing what I watch, who I call or what internet sites I visit, let alone businesses that will use that information to try and sell me something, but I trust TiVo. This trust hasn’t come overnight, it’s been built over the years by watching them always err on the side of consumers when it comes to the controversial aspects of their software, even to the detriment of their business.

When TiVo initiated their poison pill program, it might have been bad for investors because it took away the possibility of a hostile takeover, but it was great for consumers because it meant that TiVo would continue to set the ground rules for the TiVolution, even if the networks tried to buy the company just to disable the software. When they were pressured to set exlusivity agreements with various cable and satellite operators, they held firm to their belief that they needed to be able to service everyone and not just one company. These sorts of business decisions might not mean a lot to some people, but to me I’ve seen a clear demonstration that TiVo really is willing to listen and protect their customers, even when they are working with advertisers.

Because of this trust, I don’t mind if TiVo uses my information to improve the end experience. In fact, I actually want TiVo to track and report my TV usuage because it will lead to personalized advertisements that are more entertaining then another “not so fresh” commercial that has no relevance to me. Instead of forcing me to see the same ads over and over again, they could keep track of things I’ve seen before and limit the number of times I’m shown that ad.

In Austrailia, OpenTV actually digitally inserts ads into programming based upon what it knows about the users of their boxes. I think this is scary, but really neat too. If TiVo offered me a way to let advertisers show me ads of interest, I believe it could change advertising as much as Google search changed the concept of ads.

I’d also like to have personal access to my own information via my TiVo. What if TiVo could show you the average amount of TV you watch per day or what percentage of programming consumed is dramas vs. comedies. Just like consumers benefit from Google’s opt in personalization service, I believe that the data that you could get back from TiVo would make it worthwhile to let them track everything that you do. I know that I’d love to see what programs in my season pass I have a tendacy to not watch and have TiVo create a sample list of TiVo priorities that I could play with. In the end the applications are only limited by our own imagination, but the most obvious application would be a way that I could vote for ads with one to three thumbs up or down. This would allow me to communicate directly with a marketer about what I like and don’t like and would give TiVo a way to compare demographic data with the success of programming and advertisements.

To date, TiVo has been too paranoid that people would see this as an intrusion of their privacy to launch these sorts of programming, but after having dated for this long, I’m ready to commit. Now TiVo might not be willing to make a life time committment with me anymore, but at the very least they should give me an opportunity to let them get to know me a little better and for me to get to know myself better (how does TiVo know about my weakness for Matlock anyway?)

In the end, not everyone is going to embrace this idea, but if they gave users like myself a way to opt into this program, I don’t see how it would be controversial. Kalehoff, points out that TiVo users tend to be early adopters and while the data that we could provide wouldn’t be representative of the overall population, such a program could be a goldmine of information for consumers and marketers. By letting us opt into personalized television, TiVo could take their TiVo Suggestions program to an entirely new level. Given the sheer passion that TiVo evangelists seem to express, I think that there are many of us TiVo fans who would be willing to give up a little bit of privacy to help the company and to improve the quality of how TiVo interacts with the customer. In the end it’s important that these sorts of initives be done on an opt in basis, but when you’ve dated TiVo for as long as I have, you don’t really have many secrets that you want to keep from them.