TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings | Hacker News Reader

TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings

cordcuttersnews.com

180 pointsdmitrygr112 comments

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..."

The lesson is you can't pay the danegeld to make a problem go away - the only lasting solution is to get the power and sovereignty to do it yourself. Or as Kipling put it - "But Iron – Cold Iron – is master of them all."

Had to do this recently and buy a wireless HDMI adapter to stream to my own tv. The alternatives all need internet and its just not necessary or reliable and there has to be a reason they all want internet when its technically unnecessary

Then you have lobbyists, who perform the same function as advertisers. Those with power are the most ad-targeted of all.

'Power' in this case is hardware and software under your control.

Power in this case is the political power. There's no other power.

Political power grows from the barrel of a torrent client, in this case.

ICYMI, ang_cire is making a reference to

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"

--Mao Zedong.

Yes there is. It's much easier to enforce laws if everyone's electronics tattle on them, or if they are otherwise sabotaged, as with DRM, than if citizens have tools that answer to and obey only them.

If there were no other power than political, we wouldn't need weapons to fight wars or rebellions.

weapons are a tool to wield political power.

I wound pay not to have TiVo at all.

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."

The correct response should be to actively disregard all IP owned by corporations participating in that behavior.

I don't listen to podcasts with ads, but my wife does, and I was in a car ride with her a couple of weeks ago, and she demonstrated something that I hadn't known about even though it's trivial. Her fast forward button skipped forward 30 seconds, and her rewind button skipped back 10 seconds. So it allowed her to skip forward by 30 second increments until she got to content, and then skip back by 10 seconds until she got to the break. I'm sure this is well known by everyone, but it seems to be a generic enough algorithm that France would have trouble banning it. Is it that France is banning the skip commercial functionality or they're literally preventing video players from skipping forward by 30 seconds? Seems draconian if it's the latter, but then again, I was blown away by how La Liga has been the tail wagging the internet dog lately.

I'm inferring that "banning skipping commercials" is a restriction on the part of the service provider, not on the part of France's legislature

That is the exact reason spotify only allows 15 second skips both ways.

In Switzerland there's another solution: the streaming providers (Sunrise, Teleboy) insert their own ads if you choose to skip the channel ads. To be fair, Teleboy offers also a more expensive tier without ads at all, but like other commenters said, I reckon that public is gonna be milked more and more.

In Portugal, the providers were fined for showing ads in recordings and ordered to stop.

Call up cable tv provuder and say" due to a specific demand by me, i am cancelling my tv service." Then use the time you would have watched tv to lobby to red&ce copyright back to the original 14 years where it probably belonged.

Solution—don’t watch TV

Or use tvheadend + comskip

I suppose you could walk away to grab a snack or bathroom break during a commercial like in the old days but then I assume we will accelerate our path to drinking the verification can.

Reference for those who don’t know the meme

https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF

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

Wait until you hear of the extended version of this: Some longer whole day live sports on Dutch RTL (and others, it's catching on) have the option for playback but you have to watch from the start and cannot fast forwards in any way. Want to watch the last match? You need to pay more or play several hours of ad ridden TV first!

They are just m3u8 files so extract that, drop it in VLC and you are fine. But 99.9% of the populance will never be able to do that.

HD+ is 17 years old already (German hd broadcast for private channels). One of its features were no skipping commercials in your own recordings.

I don't understand, how is this possibly implemented?

Sweden

I couldn't imagine engaging with any form of media where the possibility of being exposed to an ad exists. I haven't seen an ad in over 20 years now and I can't go back.

Only watch Blu-rays and when I do Youtube, I do it through yt-dlp. If there are ads, I'm out. I just can't physically handle this assault on my mind. It's too much.

It's astonishing that people accept advertising as normal and acceptable. It's psychological abuse.

Obviously this doesn't apply to classified ads or their electronic equivalents. But what we normally mean by advertising, where people are paid vast sums of money to think very, very hard about how to manipulate you to hand over money for shit you don't need, is vomit-inducing. Billboards are even worse because they deface and degrade the public landscape, and ugly landscapes can contribute to depression, anxiety, irrational anger, and other problems. They are as bad as littering.

What has made people think this is ok?

The ads have changed. Back in my adolescence, I would read the back pages of Byte, Nintendo World, Sega something, Computer Shopper. I devoured them, there was no scorn.

These days it is ads of folks around my age doing a yoga type of a thing on a beach and stretching joyfully at sunrise.

The ads are about some meds that can cause suicidal thoughts and constipation (in small print and quick blah blah blah) but "may" help your arthritis.

Then, a $150K Ranger Rover ad, a thing I'd never want to be seen in even if I could afford it.

I've worked in digital ad tech for many years, I like ads, but I want good ads. Never bought anything from a 180 second long ad on Amazon Prime Video.

One would think that with all PII that's been gathered, a brand could scratch an itch, but nah, it's just useless carpet bombing.

I've been to France and I've seen the ads on public channels on a hotel TV. They were very innocuous compared to merde we are fed in the states.

I think it is the boiling frog experience. It has just slowly happened over time, and sometimes they push too hard and get blow back. So you step it down a notch but keep pushing forward until one day you look back and can't remember a day where there were no ads.

I have ad free household. We treat ads like a poison, like there's a fire. Over the top reaction to shut them down if they creep in. It has taught my own child to avoid ads like the plague (unlike their peers).

I have no idea how people use the Internet with all the ads, no blockers. It is just bonkers, and even at work it is an uphill battle to convince people ad-blockers should be enforced just to protect the business from malicious ads, let alone their own brains.

I want to lobby to have all adverts removed from public transport, but I am unsure how to do that in Australia, but I will work it out.

Yeah I've taught my kids to treat ads the same way, and we make a joke about quickly turning the screen off when ads come on. Of course we have UBO and Unhook installed, plus DNS blocking. I tell them what I put in my post above, that advertising is a form of deceit, manipulation to get you to act against your own interest. Naturally we don't have a TV, because why would anyone want to do that?

I don't know what I'm going to teach them about politics when the time comes, since (what most people mean by) politics is essentially a particularly malevolent and dangerous species of advertising, but at the same time I don't want to make them too cynical.

I don't know if the boiling frog thesis explains it, since it's gone from near-zero to 100 in non-western countries over the past couple of decades, unlike the west where it's built up slowly over the past century and a half.

Didn't know about Unhook, seems like a great extension to use.

The SponsorBlock extension does a good job of skipping inline YT ads when watching on the site.

And not only that, but also has settings (configurable per channel) to skip intros/outros, tangents, etc.

It's the superior Youtube experience that, funnily enough, is not available on paid platforms like Apple TV.

This is how I use SponserBlock with YouTube on my Apple TV:

https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

>iSponsorBlockTV is a self-hosted application that connects to your YouTube TV app and automatically skips segments in YouTube videos using the SponsorBlock API.

I prefer to take it as the video creator confessing that their voice is for sale and not to be trusted and then act accordingly by closing the video and making a mental not never to watch anything from that person again.

I am on the same boat. Product placements on movies and TV series are bad enough.

So, like, you just have to imagine all the things that could make you unhappy and jealous that you don't have?!?

So you don't use any form of social media whatsoever? Ad blocks don't block sponsored content

Sponsorblock does exactly that (and a bit more). I can't watch youtube without it nowadays. Subscription feed -> yt-dlp -> mpv with sponorblock. If this ever stops working I'm not suffering through ads, I'm ignoring youtube as a platform.

You can use yt-dlp with sponsorblock timings directly [0] to get rid of all the sponsorship segments from the final video, no need to use it later via mpv.

[0] https://yt-dlp.net/guides/sponsorblock

that is awesome

What about product placements in movies?

I don't mind as long as it doesn't take me out of the story. It probably helps that I don't recognize most products being placed, as I do not know ads.

Thinking about it... product placements do introduce an interesting dynamic.

TV shows I watched in the past often went out of their way to change brand names, for example Somy instead of Sony, WacDonalds instead of MacDonalds etc.

This is done to avoid copyright infringement, I think.

But on the other side brands pay to be inserted.

my blu-ray’s have ads before the movie starts.

My Blu-ray rips do not.

Yes, I also couldn't watch a Blu-ray in a normal player. Too many ads.

Not to mention user-hostile features like region restrictions or DRM requirements for your TV and display connection that are incompatible with free computing.

The most surprising thing here is that Tivo is still a company.

I knew the Tivo employee that coded the GUI button for "play a random recorded episode" (circa 2010). He/Nate left there ~2012, when it seemed to be on its last gasps of relevency.

An unrelated-shoutout to all us "Papered Trees," from waybackwhen... boy did we watch some recorded television, stoned.

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.

> "TiVo still exists?"

Certainly that's my reaction that made me click on this. Hard to believe.

Never used TiVo but I ran a MythTV box for a long time, it was really awesome. But it's been ~15+ years or so haven't used it. Can't believe TiVo still exists.

> TiVo still exists?

Not for long. They stopped making hardware a while ago, this feels like the last ditch attempt to find a new business model that works, before it doesn't and what is left of the company is bought and asset stripped (the key remaining asset likely being what data they hold about their customers).

TiVo has already been bought by some patent trolls years ago.

In that case I'm surprised they still hold on to the rest. I would expect them to hold it for long enough that a quick resale doesn't tank what value they can get, keep the patent portfolio and flog the rest for someone else to strip. Presumably then this is an attempt to push up the monthly income figures temporarily ready for a sale, I doubt a patent troll cares about the long term business now they have the part they are experts on exploiting.

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.

They were saying the same thing about DVR's ability to skip those pesky ads, and look where we are.

When the enshittification hits AI, your AI will magically develop the ability to politely refuse such a request.

You could hack together your own solution (like you can today), but most people won't and that's the point.

This general kind of thing is why diverse (currently Chinese) AI is so important ... and one reason it'll be banned.

I don’t see why China would have an incentive to keep investing in open models long-term. They aren’t doing that for the betterment of society.

What's the incentive now and why would that change, in your view?

Exactly. This (the argument you’re replying to) is basically the same as when some new tech is introduced to the public (e.g. LLMs) and on day one you get hundreds of hot takes on how some company (e.g. Google) is DOOMED. As if they’ll just roll over and die at the first sign of trouble.

It’s like smacking a tennis ball to the other side of the court and immediately thinking you won, completely ignoring there’s a person on the other who’ll just smack it back.

It boggles the mind how people still fall for the promises of these giants about what a wonderful world they’ll create and all the amazing things you’ll be able to do. Whoever was caught off guard by (for example) LLM providers introducing ads hasn’t been paying any attention.

This. I think the generation that grew up and became adults alongside the Internet (so, early techie millennials) already lived through this illusion. And yes, some of the initial dreams/promises actually became true but most turned sideways given enough time, and the same will happen again.

Astra flagged my request to look into a security vulnerability into my own(!) code. So I’m not sure.

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

It was based on a patent for a system where you had to get up from your couch and yell McDonalds to continue you game or movie. Its prophetic because it is satirizing those corporations explicit fantasies.

As I recall from the original post when it was going around, it was related to the xbox one (before it was released at the end of 2013) being online only and blocking the resale/trade of physical disc based games, google "xbox one 2013 controversy"

https://www.google.com/search?&q=xbox+one+2013+controversy

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/19/xbox-one-...

The patent was filed in 2009 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en

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.

> 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 the end you'll win this war, maybe not in the way you envisioned but win it you will by avoiding 'content' altogether. There is more than enough to read, listen to, see and do that you don't need 'content' to keep you satisfied. Drop it like the lukewarm turd it is and you'll be better off while they can hide their ads where the sun don't shine.

Source: living ad- and 'content'-free for decades

I'll add that much of the 'content' is very carefully designed to be the canvas for the advertisements. ie: the content reaferms your demographic/cultural afinity and opens you up to suggestions that are attached even oblicquely, rather than persuing an interest of your own that actualy benifits you. By watching media alone instead of it bieng a group outing you give up even the real cultural reafermation of dragging or bieng drug along by friends where doing the thing together is of more interest than the media, unless on the rare occasion when you get to see something world class that you all take with you. These glowing slabs, aint that. Beware, Beware the glare.

I agree. Most of the life-changing content I've consumed has been either freely available (in the public domain or online) or a one-time-purchase, ad-free book.

You didn't "consume" that "content", that's newspeak which we'd all be better off without. You read books, listened to music, saw movies, plays, etc. You didn't "consume" them either, they're still there after all? You're not a "content consumer" but a person, an individual who reads, listens, sees, experiences.

I don't like that phrase either, but do you have a direct replacement? Language usage tends toward efficiency, and sometimes I want to speak generally rather than specifically, and so if my options for conveying the idea 'read books and/or listened to music and/or saw plays and/or watched tv and/or ......' are to write that out or to say 'consumed content', I'm probably going to hold my nose and go with the latter, at least once I've heard it enough times for it to feel relatively normal.

edit: actually, and this is just a tangential point, I don't think 'content' covers plays or other live experiences. It's usually screen-based, and the main possible exceptions are things that are almost interchangeable with their screen-mediated forms, like books or magazines.

I think back on when I consumed the most "content". It was way back before I worked from home. The peer pressure was a significant part of why.

I agree with you otherwise, though.

must be nice...

On iOS, I see ads for paying for iCloud.

Entering my own apartment, the elevator has ads blasting on the tv.

Wont even start on Windows or web browsers.

> On iOS..

There's your problem, you rented a terminal managed by the fruit factory so they get to decide who the thing serves. Either "jailbreak" the thing or get a Google-free Android device with an AOSP-derived distribution on it. I have the latter and I don't see any ads.

Windows... same thing. Avoid it if you can and yes, you can unless your employer forces it upon you. In that case see if you can use the LTSP version since that isn't as laden with spy- and adware as the regular versions.

Browsers? Firefox or one of its derivatives help to get rid of ads and other nuisances. I don't see any ads on either mobile or X-top, they don't seem to make it through the combination of network, host and application-level filtering. Those filters just work without needing maintenance, you just need to put them in place.

As to that elevator blasting ads you're more or less on the same situation. The only way to avoid that would be to make sure you manage your own environment. Doing so is much more involving than changing from a fruit phone to something under your own control. I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside where ads just don't seem to thrive, I understand this isn't for everyone but if you're serious in wanting to escape there'll be something similar available in whatever country you call your own.

Firefox has ads on by default.

I can’t develop apps to the AppStore without an iOS device, which is a source of income for me.

Degoogled androids have issues with push notifications and banking apps

There isn’t an AirPod pro experience on Google free android.

If my iphone breaks, it’s super easy for me to buy a new one and recover from a backup while I travel.

Sounds like you don't dislike the ads all that much if those are your excuses.

Just in case you don't know the SponsorBlock extension can skip past Youtube interleaved ads, promotional items other time wasters. You can pick and choose what you want to skip and in the Youtube Interface you can also press a button to automatically go past a skipped item you wanted to see. [1]:https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Also hate clickbait title cards? Theres now an extension to remove those as well: https://dearrow.ajay.app/

This SponsorBlock extension also integrates with yt-dlp so downloaded videos can have ads stripped in the final video. That way you don't even have to ever go to youtube itself. The war isn't over yet and people must keep fighting back.

Yeah, I pay for youtube so I don't have to watch ads, but then youtube creators at some point all decided to jump on the bandwagon of interleaving ads into their content. Many are kind enough to make it easy to jump ahead to when the ad is over, but man, I would much prefer they set up a patreon or just let me pay them through youtube's own UI. Incredibly annoying.

I'm surprised YouTube allows it. I'd expect them to want "their" share of the ad money, since creators in a way are side stepping the "normal" ad flow.

The only winning move is not to play.

Only old school media is holding themselves to a standard. No AI, no sponsored content. And thank god we still have a public broadcaster.

The future is unfortunately propaganda and brain rot.

What is keeping you hooked to that type of content?

There’s an easy solution that I’ve taken: just stop watching stuff. Choose not to participate in the bullshit.

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.

If you can get your recording to play in the browser my TivySkip Web Extension[0][1] will skip broadcast commercials for free. I use Jellyfin's web portal to playback my recordings adfree but the ext will actually work on any site playing live TV with various jump around and visual block/mute schemes to choose from.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tivyskip/ [1] https://github.com/relaxo-player/TivySkip-extension

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.

ADs are why I pirate most media. Yeah sure I could rip a lot of it from blurays and strip it out, but why should I need to go through the effort to play media I already own the way I want? Why spend the power and time to rip a BR when someone else has already done it? I can download a rip faster than I can rip from a disc already in my drive.

I’ve been a TiVo holdout because it is a great for OTA and can stream recordings to mobile devices, even over the internet. It really just works.

That said, I paid for a lifetime subscription for a specific feature set. I’m sure there terms allow them to turn it into a brick without having to compensate me. They seem to want to get rid of their non-corporate customers anyway, so maybe this is how they do it.

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'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.

Never owned a TiVo, but I just looked up what skipmode is, and I thought that was the whole point of a TiVo.

Like, it has always been advertised as record shows and skip commercials. When they said skip commercials in the early 2000s, did they just mean fast forward?

there's a 30 second skip button, and also the fast forward button is really well tuned so you watch for the end of the commercial break, hit play, it jumps back a few seconds to where you couldn't react fact enough. It all worked very well somehow.

I loved TiVo for years also until around 2011 or so, when I 'upgraded' my ancient box to whatever their new hardware was. The interface was so laggy I could no longer consistently FF through crap and have it autorewind that couple of seconds to the beginning of the show anymore. That was the impetus for me to cancel TV and sell mine completely, which I don't regret at all.

Some commend on Reddit said it was introduced in 2015. I can't verify that.

Stremio + Torrentio + Gluetun

Gabe Newell had the clearest thoughts on this topic

Yeah, it's interesting to watch humanity graduate from "how can we delight the customer the best?" to "how can we trap the customer and extract the most from them?"

Shocking! That TiVo still exists.

Ads are really a cancer of modern society.

Can we please just ban them to yellow pages only? (Where we can watch them on __our__ terms, not __their__ terms)

Far more a vice. Cancer victims don't like cancer, and try to be rid of it.

Vs. modern ads are far more like cheap-at-first drugs. Similar to dirt cheap printers with ever-more-expensive consumables, E-Z financing plans that nobody reads the fine print for, and politicians who conveniently forget all their wonderful-sounding promises the moment they're elected.

can't believe tivo is still around.

They stopped selling new units and lifetime subscriptions about a year ago.

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.

The pinnacle of enshittification

Enshitiffication again.

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.

Isn't this because it's not a free market, e.g. the DMCA and other laws that prevent publishing how to work around digital locks?

Yep. IP is not true "property" either, since it is not "scarce"

Free markets are impossible under capitalism. If wealth is allowed to concentrate there will be some companies that get so powerful they can influence public policy.

At that point you get regulations designed to make competing with them expensive or risky, like DMCA or submarine patents. They also legalize union busting and get courts to declare that you can get fired for any reason and getting pressured to sign an unfair contract is your fault.

The only thing you can really do against it as a government is making sure nobody ever captures a majority of any market and workers have ultimate control over their company. But that system is a form of market socialism so you can't really call it capitalist anymore.

Correct, in a free market the returns reflect the underlying reality and if that reality means that in the capital abundance stage further capital is unnecessary and capital carries maintenance costs, then the return to capital becomes negative.

If capitalism is the pathological obsession that capital should always net a positive return, then it is incompatible with free markets by definition.

> 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

That is also the title I see clicking through into the page, although it seems to be 24 characters over the limit, so that _some_ change to OP would have have been required to submit it.

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