TiVo: Why It Gets No Gold Stars for Mandatory Ads

"I largely ignored the first, frantic messages I received about the vexing 'gold star' problem--until it happened to me. One morning, a new entry magically appeared on my TiVo Central menu: 'Counting Crows Music & Interviews!' had materialized right below 'Messages & Setup....'

The Whingers are all riled up because there's no way to delete these gold-star ads once they show up on your TiVo system. They stay there, taking up valuable hard drive space that could otherwise be devoted to recordings of your favorite shows, until TiVo decides to takes them away and replace them with other gold-star ad content....

We TiVo subscribers paid for that hard drive space, and we continue to pay for it on a monthly basis. Are we wrong to resent it when, after charging us hundreds for the hardware and (over the course of a few years) hundreds in subscription fees, after collecting and selling our personal viewing data, TiVo sees fit to use up precious hard drive space, too?

Is there no end to this perfidy? Is the TiVo service really worth this? Ah, there's the rub, and the reason other TiVo subscribers will dismiss this rant as pointless whinging: The TiVo service IS worth it." [ZDNet]

Actually, it's not worth it. Maybe if they were able to send targeted ads that you could delete when you want to delete them, then it might conceivably be worth it. Get a ReplayTV instead - SonicBlue fights disseminating your personal data and they innovate with the consumer in mind, not the industry!