There's an old adage, it might even be from the Bible, that warns that no man can serve two masters. Unfortunately that's the position that TiVo increasingly finds itself in. While customers love the ad-skipping they can do with the service, the company is enjoying the revenue that comes from finding new and innovative ways to serve ads to those same customers. CEO Tom Rogers seems to be paying lip service to the former use while cozying up more and more to the ad industry.

Rogers points to deals the company has done to deliver ads as a major revenue source for TiVo in the future. He wants to position the company in such a way that the ad industry works with it to develp new ways to serve ads that aren't skipped and don't fall into the 30-second spot model. I think this is a fantastic plan, assuming the long-range goal is to honk of a significant portion of the user base. A better model to pursue, I believe, is the one given a short mention at the end of the article: Position TiVo as a valuable resource of reliable data on consumer ad-watching behavior. The company likely has tons of data on what ads were watched, which ones weren't, which ones were watched multiple times and other such slices and dices.