TiVo's Infamous Banned Ad Revealed

Early after TiVo (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 commercial, 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.

Disclosure: Author is long TIVO

Comments

[DavidJackson]

Hard to see what the networks were upset about??? The commercial ends with two guys throwing the TV network CEO out the window!

[DavisFreeberg]

I got a good chuckle out of it. The irony is that TiVo would never have been able to go public if the networks hadn't invested so heavily in their stock. They got hit twice by TiVo, once in the .com burst and now as ad money is moving away from the 30 second spots.