It sure seems like someone being smart about the future rather than fearing it. It's a great thing to see. If only the music industry had gone that way. If they had, they would probably not be struggling now.
I've been wondering how advertisers were going to defeat Tivo.
They've BEEN doing this (making it where ads could be fastforwarded and still read).
Look at the text that is slowly displayed in the center of the screen. Sometimes a black screen. Videotape had skew when fastforwarded but no significant details were in the ads there.
My DVR drive will "advance" 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes without having to show me any of what is in between. So unless they are bumping up the "male interest" factor (i.e. sexy women), men are unlikely to even try looking for the ads.
More likely, the future of advertising will be "popups" that superimpose over the program itself (look at the CW logo hype or whatever that new channel is called). That or to the side of the program (as we go to widescreen tv, there will be a lot of "gutter" from the old format that 50 years of tv reruns are still formatted to (unless we start chopping off the top and bottom of the screen on old shows).
The OTHER options they have are digital lockout on changing rhe volume/channel (like a DVD remote is locked out when you load most discs) or these new 8 second "branding" corporate anthems (its not just the networks that use them these days).