The person in charge of selling ad time at ABC, unsurprisingly, completely misses the whole point of the DVR thing:

"I'm not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance," [ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw] said. "It really is a matter of convenience--so you don't miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we're just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I'm not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don't fundamentally believe that.

On the extremely odd chance Mr. Shaw runs across this, for the record, my wife and I were very early adopters of Tivo, purchasing ours sometime in 1999 – back when the lifetime membership was something you really had to think about, because it wasn’t clear Tivo would be around long enough for it to be worth the price – and being able to skip commercials was the primary reason for the purchase.

At this point, if I had to go back to actually watching commercials, I’d give up on broadcast television altogether, I think…

(Story originally seen on Interesting People; later on /..)