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Dear ABC, You Don’t Compete With TiVo By Making A Product Worse
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About a year and a half ago, an executive at Disney-owned ABC-TV talked about how the network was experimenting with ways to block people from fast forwarding through commercials. The exec in question even claimed that commercial-skipping wasn’t even a very important feature for most DVR-owners. Despite the widespread criticism of this statement, it appears that ABC is now preparing to test that theory. In association with cable company Cox, it’s testing a new video-on-demand feature that won’t let viewers fast forward through commercials. We’ll be the first to say it: this is dumb. While it may make a few more people watch commercials, it won’t make them happy about it. And, given just how many other options there are these days, the end result might be that people just choose not to watch such ABC programming at all, let alone the commercials.
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Then there’s Ray Cole, who owns some ABC affiliates. He says: “As network and affiliates, we both have an interest in slowing down the explosive growth of DVRs. This is about combating DVRs. As we developed this at every stage, there was an agreement that however we put this together, disabling the fast-forward function was key.” I’m curious as to how Mr. Cole thinks offering a product that does much less and deliberately takes away a key feature will “slow down” the “explosive growth of DVRs.” You don’t compete by offering a worse product.
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