TiVo price drop; catches Janet bare-breasted too
Ars Technica: "For those of you who did not watch the Super Bowl last night or just plain missed the half-time show because you were taking a bathroom break/getting more guacamole dip/what-have-you, Janet Jackson briefly bared a breast during her half-time performance. Unfortunately, the CBS network was unable to cut-away before said nakedness was able to make it to the airwaves of national television. Such an obvious publicity stunt is not normally such a news worthy event here at Ars Technica, but what is rather amusing is that according to TiVo, viewers repeatedly their hit rewind-play-pause buttons to catch a short glimpse of Janet in all her glory. According to News.com.com.com (dot com):

TiVo subscribers hit rewind on the Jackson-Timberlake incident nearly three times more than they did on any other moment during the broadcast. That makes the moment the most rewatched ever during a broadcast in three years of measuring audience reactions, a TiVo representative said. The findings were based on an anonymous sampling of 20,000 TiVo subscribers who watched the Super Bowl.

Which leads to two questions: How anonymous is this 'anonymous sampling' when TiVo has the unit's unique ID number associated with the subscriber? What sort of events (past and/or future) might possibly be more watched than the one that most of the nation just witnessed this past Sunday?"
- posted by Sophont @ Thursday, February 05, 2004