TiVo’s Infamous Banned Commercial Surfaces
Early after TiVo was founded, the company tried to run an advertising campaign highlighting some of their less advertising friendly features. When the studios found out that TiVo wanted to run the ads they rejected them as being in poor taste. While officially, the studios simply said that they felt that the ad wasn’t appropriate for their networks, the underlying message was certainly clear, they weren’t going to help TiVo sell a device that threatened their very ad departments. For years I’ve seen vague references to the commericial, but have never seen it, nor have I ever come across any hard evidence backing up that the commercial even existed. In fact up until just this year, I had never seen TiVo even advertise on TV and I always assumed that it was because the networks simply refused to sell them inventory. Interestingly enough though, someone has now uploaded TiVo’s originally banned clip to YouTube and I now know that it exists. Hard to see what the studio heads were so worked up about, but enjoy it while you can because TiVo has started a nasty habit of forcing YouTube to remove their videos for reasons that I can’t comprehend.
Posted on December 6th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TiVo
That commercial played on TV before, I don’t recall if I saw it on regular TV or cable, but I do recall seeing that commercial quite often way back when Tivo was first launched. Its pretty memorable with the guys tossing the suit out the window.
This is not a banned commerical at all. It ran quite frequently on TV, I saw it a ton of times. But it is also TiVo’s FIRST commercial. Came out right around the same time that old Golf commercial with Ronnie Lott & Joe Montana golfing was out, too.
I’m pretty sure that the commercial was banned. TiVo may have gotten it on some of the cable channels, but I’ve read that at least some of the networks rejected the ad as being too controversial. To me, the ad was never anything more then a rumor until I saw it, so finding it on YouTube was a bit like seeing Bigfoot for a certified TiVo fan boy.
Ya, this commercial definitely wasn’t banned from TV. I saw it many many times on TV (and several other TiVo commercials too) back in the 2000-2001 time frame.
Conceivably it could have been on cable channels only but if you think about it, the ad threatens cable channels as much as network TV. I even recall that specific ad being mentioned in a New York Times article. If you search the TiVoCommunity and/or Fool archives, I know we talked about it on the forums when it aired.
…Dale
Can anyone tell me who’s providing the voice over? I can’t figure it out and it’s driving me, well, you know.
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