Entrepreneurship

Tivo Tool idea

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ April 23, 2006 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I was just thinking to myself about how old media companies like Time Warner, News Corp, Disney, etc. are in trouble — DVRs and Tivo are slowly removing the revenue stream out from under these big boys. It’s the high-end American consumer, too — the ones with the most disposable income.

I don’t have any ideas for saving their businesses, but a thought just occurred to me — why not an indexing service that provides Tivo/DVR users with the time indexes for the commercial advertisements? So, say, when you’re appliance records desperate housewives this Sunday, your Tivo automatically goes and fetches the time indexes for the commercials and incorporates them into the playback. This way, when you get ’round to watching it, you don’t even have to fast forward.

Only thing I can’t figure out is the business model. I can’t see customers paying for it directly, and there’s not exactly a contextual advertising medium. Maybe you have to agree to give up some personal data and get a single piece of spam every month in order to use the indexing service? Doesn’t seem like it would pan out… the cost of providing the indexes would have to be offloaded to users somehow, or else the whole thing falls down.

Still. There’s probably a way of tweaking the idea a bit to make it economically feasible. And it definitely inspires the geek in me.