Millennials, that coveted and seemingly tough-to-reach market segment, stream a lot of video, but a new study by Fullscreen conducted by WPP’s Kantar Vermeer tries to put a finer point on that trend.

From a high-level view, 69% in the 13-to-34 age group stream video on three or more occasions per week. Broken down further, the percentage is higher among teens (75%), while Millennials in the over-25 subgroup are at parity with the average (66%), according to an online survey conducted in March among 2,000 people (1,000 who were 12-17 years old, and 1,000 who were 18 to 34 years old).

Of the older sub-segment studies, 71% said they stream video through the TV at least an hour a day, versus teen usage that came in much lower – 56%.

“We have found the driver of this to be the preference of independent viewing experiences on laptops and mobile devices,” Bryon Schafer, senior vice president of measurement and insight at Otter Media, which owns Fullscreen, noted in a summary of the study.

And count Millennials among a group that will go out of its way to avoid ads due to a range of dislikes. More than 70% of them agree that interruptions are the most negative aspect of advertising, followed closely by ad repetition. Additionally, 36% of the teens sub-group, and 47% of the broader Millennials segment said they avoid or block ads every change they get.

Over half (53%) of Millennials and teens said they always skip online ads after five seconds, and a mere 5% said they never skip.

On the positive side (for advertisers, anyway), more than 75% of respondents said they are willing to watch branded content so long as they are enjoying the video, 82% of the total surveyed group said they are open to ads for products they are interested in, and 79% who see a brand stitched into the video will continue watching and don’t mind that the core content and the ad are presented together.

The study also shed some additional light on how influencers from the OTT realm inspire trust and relatability in content – about half (47%) of teens and 51% of the larger Millennials group follow someone on YouTube, and 60% of all surveyed felt that influencers are relatable, and 56% said they can trust what a YouTube influencers says.

And, given these trends, perhaps it’s no surprise that healthy cut of this group (44% of teens and about 30% of Millennials) aspire to become a YouTube influencer.

TiVo claims that TV networks are refusing to allow the company to run ads on its new 4K-capable Bolt DVR because they are annoyed with the product’s ad-zapping "SkipMode" feature.  

SkipMode, a controversial component initially offered on TiVo’s new 4K-capable Bolt device and recently extended to TiVo’s family of Roamio DVRs deployed in markets such as Chicago and San Francisco, lets users skip commercial breaks in recorded shows with the click of a button.

Early on, that capability is being supported on almost two dozen channels, including the Big 4 broadcasters, for shows (except for local content and sporting events) that run each day between 4 p.m. and midnight. SkipMode can also work on TiVo Mini boxes that are connected to a Bolt or Roamio.

“We’re totally cool with viewers keeping their cable subscriptions alive and well. But we also understand that commercial interruptions are one of the biggest annoyances for many cable-goers, despite commercials being a source of revenue for the networks,” TiVo said in this blog post dated March 29. “So, when we wanted to advertise the heck out of TiVo BOLT, why did the networks refuse to run our ads? The reason? SkipMode™, one of the TiVo BOLT’s flagship features.”

TiVo’s blog item did not identify any specific broadcasters or cable networks that refused to run ads for Bolt. Multichannel News has asked the company for those and to see if SkipMode is the sole reason for their refusal.

Update: TiVo is not commenting beyond what it said in the blog posting. 

The current crop of SkipMode-enabled channels include ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, AMC, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, TBS, FX, TLC, History, TNT, CW, Food Network, USA Network, Bravo, ABC Family (now Freeform), Syfy, Lifetime, and HGTV.

Broadcasters and other TV programmers historically have not taken kindly to ad-skipping features. In February, Dish Network and 21st Century Fox announced they had settled a lawsuit over the satellite giant’s AutoHop ad-skipping feature, agreeing to disable the feature for seven days after a program originally airs. AutoHop has been a key part of recent carriage negotiations for Dish, which agreed to disable the feature renewing carriage deals with The Walt Disney Co. (which was not part of the 2012 suit) in March 2014 and with CBS in December 2014. Comcast’s NBC Universal unit remains sole litigant in the original AutoHop suit that hasn’t announced a settlement with Dish. 

Notably, TiVo is surfacing this amid a restructuring in which it will reduce retail-focused spending while placing a greater emphasis on MVPD partnerships. TiVo is also reportedly in acquisition talks with Rovi.

Dish Network and 21st Century Fox have settled their lawsuit over the satellite giant’s AutoHop ad-skipping feature, agreeing to disable the feature for seven days after a program originally airs.

Fox sued Dish over the AutoHop feature in 2012. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but in a statement Dish said an agreement had been reached.

“Fox Networks Group and Dish Network L.L.C. have reached an agreement resulting in the dismissal of all pending litigation between the two companies, including disputes over Slingbox technology and the AutoHop, PrimeTime Anytime and Transfers features,” Dish said in the statement. “As part of the settlement, Dish’s AutoHop commercial-skipping functionality will not be available for owned and affiliated Fox stations until seven days after a program first airs.”

 The satellite giant declined to comment if the settlement means other networks will get the same treatment.  

The AutoHop has been a key component of past carriage negotiations for Dish. It has agreed to disable the ad-skipping feature after renewing carriage deals with The Walt Disney Co. (which was not part of the 2012 suit) in March 2014 and with CBS in December 2014. Fox renewed its carriage agreement with Dish in January 2015 – and said at the time that the renewal would probably iron out its issue with the Auto Hop. But it still took more than a year to reach a settlement.

With CBS and Fox all reaching deal, that leaves Comcast’s NBC Universal unit as the sole litigant in the original suit without a settlement. NBC Universal declined comment.

TiVo has been testing a network/cloud DVR with several operators, including with Virgin Media, for a while but it doesn’t appear that anyone’s ready to take the plunge just yet. 

“It’s not something that many operators are prepared to move forward with quickly as it relates to their core set-top service,” TiVo president and CEO Tom Rogers said ahead of the company’s Q3 call. TiVo showed off a prototype of its network DVR at the 2014 CES.

“It’s really less about us and our ability to provide it and more about when their readiness will be there, which has a lot of hardware implications for them, as well as content rights implications for them,” he said, noting that “we’ve trialed it, and it works.”

Those legal and storage implications are particularly acute in the U.S., where network and cloud DVR offerings must make individual recordings, versus a more efficient model in which a copy could be shared by multiple subs. It’s the approach that Comcast and Cablevision Systems are using for their respective cloud DVR and “remote-storage” DVR products.

For now, Rogers said there’s more interest among TiVo’s partners on approaches that enable viewers to access and sideload recorded shows via mobile apps and devices, something that TiVo already does, and a capability that Verizon FiOS is starting to introduce on its Quantum TV platform.

Elsewhere in TiVo-land, the company is about to extend two features found on its new Bolt DVR – QuickMode and SkipMode – to its last-gen Roamio DVR family.

Per this TiVo Roamio holiday sale page, QuickMode and  SkipMode are slated for release on TiVo Roamio DVRs on Dec. 10.  

QuickMode enables playback at 1.3 times real time with pitch-corrected audio. However, SkipMode, a feature that lets users skip commercial breaks in recorded shows with the click of a button on almost two dozen channels, will initially be offered on Roamio products in the San Francisco/Bay Area and Chicago markets.

TiVo will look to amp up retail sales with the Bolt, a new platform that supports 4K streaming, a menu of OTT apps, traditional digital cable video services, and a new “SkipMode" feature that could become a lightning rod of controversy with programmers.

As shown at left, the Bolt sports a new, smaller and arc-like form-factor, but will kick things off with two differently priced models – the 500 Gigabyte version will cost $299.99, while the 1 terabyte model will fetch $399.99. Bolt pricing bakes in the first year of the TiVo service, which will later cost subs 14.99 per month or $149 annually. TiVo and its online retail partners will start taking orders today (fulfillments begin next week), and the Bolt will show up at Best Buy brick and mortar stores starting this Sunday.

Bolt will also contain a CableCARD slot (it’s located on the device’s undercarriage) and, for the cord-cutting crowed, will also allow users to capture free, over-the-air TV broadcast signals. The Bolt is also outfitted with MoCA 2.0 for whole-home capabilities when paired with the $149.99 (non-4K) TiVo Mini, and 802.11ac dual-band WiFi.

Bolt’s 4K support will come way of HDMI 2.0, HDCP 2.2 and the HEVC and VP9 decode formats, and will initially support 4K via Netflix and YouTube.

"I do expect to add more 4K apps as time goes along; we're working on our application partners on that,” Jim Denney, TiVo’s vice president of product management and strategy, said.

Equipped with four tuners, the Bolt also includes on-board video transcoding for streaming of recorded and live TV to Android and iOS devices and Web browsers. Bolt will support one simultaneous stream at launch, though a November software release will unleash a second. The Bolt will add out-of-home streaming early next year, Denney said.

Replaces the Roamio-S

The TiVo Bolt will essentially replace the Roamio-S, which requires the TiVo Stream sidecar for video transcoding, and “likely replaces” the Roamio Plus in the company’s product line, Denney said. Like the  Roamio-S, TiVo also expects to eventually phase out the CableCARD-free Roamio OTA (the Bolt handles OTA signals).

Updated: However, earlier findings tied to TiVo's new platform suggested that TiVo is also developing an "Aereo Edition" of Bolt, suggesting that TiVo might come out with a model that, like the Roamio OTA, supports OTT and over-the-air TV, but eschews the CableCARD. TiVo acquired the trademarks and the customer lists of the now-defunct Aereo service for about $1 million in March

The Roamio Pro, which doesn’t support 4K but packs six tuners and 3 TB of storage, will remain in the TiVo product lineup.  “We’ll split the line,” Denney said. (The 1.9-pound Bolt is 33% smaller than the TiVo Roamio-S and 65% than the Roamio Plus and Pro).

Bolt will start out as a retail product (the device will provide integration with Cox and Comcast VOD), but “you should expect MSO-specific versions of this coming out,” Denney said.

TiVoended its fiscal Q2 with 6.03 million total subs (941,000 TiVo-owned, and 5.09 million through MSO partners).

SkipMode

One feature new to Bolt that should gain lots of positive attention from consumers and possibly negative attention from programmers is SkipMode.

TiVo said the feature, which lets users skip commercial breaks in recorded shows with the click of a button, will initially be supported on 20 popular channels, including the Big 4 broadcasters, for shows (save for local content and sporting events) that run each day between 4 p.m. and midnight.

Channels that are part of that mix include FX, HGTV, History, Lifetime, NBC, ABC, ABC Family, AMC, Bravo, CBS, Syfy, TBS, TLC, TNT, USA, Comedy Central, the CW, Discovery Channel, Food Network and Fox.

To enable the feature, TiVo is creating tags on those channels that identify when programming begins or resumes. Commercial pods will be illustrated on-screen with a bar along the recording line and a pop up will prompt the viewer to press the “D” button when a commercial break is skippable. Users can also select the remote’s Channel Up/Down buttons to skip forward or back between commercial breaks.

“From a consumer standpoint, we think it’ll be a very compelling feature,” Denney said. “To a certain extent, it’s fast-forward perfected.”

Time will tell if broadcasters and other programmers feel the same way, as Dish’s Auto Hop feature for the Hopper DVR drew lawsuits from broadcasters. However, in January, a U.S. District Court said the technology that the broadcast networks objected to is legal under copyright law or the Supreme Court’s recent Aereo ruling. Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's September 2013 denial of a preliminary injunction against Dish’s Hopper DVR service.

Denney said TiVo users are already fast-forwarding through commercials. “What we’re doing is giving them [consumers] a new tool to do what they’re already doing…We’re not affecting any of the underlying content; we're creating the tags to identify where the content begins." 

Other New Features

Thanks in part to a beefier memory footprint, Bolt will support a fast app launch feature for Netflix. While it will take five to seven seconds to fire up Netflix on Bolt the first time, the suspend/resume capability with the Netflix app will reduce that to a second or two, giving it the kind of response time offered by a resident application. That feature is initially Netflix-specific, though TiVo hopes to support it in additional apps eventually. 

With Bolt,  TiVo is also rolling out a freshen up user interface that flattens the graphics, a new color palette, and network logos that will  help users more rapidly identify channels in the lineup. “It’s the TiVo UI with new graphics,” Denney said.

A new QuickMode will playback content at 1.3 times real time with pitch-corrected audio (that will make sure that dialogue played back in that mode won’t sound like Alvin and The Chipmunks).

TiVo is also debuting a new iOS app that will allow users bring more personalization and customization to its What to Watch Now element. While the hobbies and interest feature is only for the YouTube app, customers can now customize by genre across other content sources. The app is also expanding its sharing capability beyond Facebook and Twitter to include email, and links that will also direct users to OTT sources in addition to a portal where they can set a recording.

TiVo is also bringing more speed to its cross-platform (streaming, VOD and recording) OnePass with a feature called Quick Select.

And TiVo’s introducing a new remote that includes RF technology (eliminating the need for line-of-sight).  To help users find a lost remote, a button on the back of the Bolt will trigger the remote to play a song.

Alongside the new features, there’s also something that the new Bolt won’t support early on – the Hulu app.

Denney said that’s because TiVo flipped to an HTML5 app structure. Hulu’s HTML5 app isn’t ready for that platform, but TiVo, he said, hopes to bring Hulu to the Bolt “sometime soon.”