Anyone who has watched Mad Men, the show about 1960s Manhattan advertising execs, will know it is a cutthroat business. In America the battle to get television viewers to watch ads has just moved up a gear.

A new service from TiVo - the leading time-shift system here, similar to Sky+ - encourages viewers to buy items that they see during some primetime shows. Products mentioned during The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Colbert Report, for example, can now be purchased at the touch of a button. Order Oprah’s book of the month and the programme will pause while Amazon takes your order, then resume exactly where you left off.

Future plans include shopping directly from live TV. Like George Clooney’s suit or the pizza he’s eating? Hit the red button, and the pizza at least can be at your door before the credits roll.

The reason for this development is simple. American TV is enjoying a resurgence, but just as House, Heroes and Lost rekindle the country’s love affair with television, the emergence of digital video recorders (DVRs) is transforming the way people watch TV advertising - or, rather, don’t watch it.

DVRs let viewers pause and rewind live programmes and, crucially, fast-forward through commercials. The recorders can now be found in more than 28m American households, slashing advert viewing figures by billions each month. For a while it even looked as though the end of TV advertising was nigh.

What TiVo has realised is that DVRs are in effect just another channel - and a far more focused one than traditional networks. Because TiVo records every fast-forward and rewind, it can pinpoint what viewers’ interests are: watch a lot of DIY shows and you could expect to see commercials for paint and brushes. It has also experimented with pop-up adverts while users are fast-forwarding.

Far from killing adverts, DVRs are giving advertisers access to viewing habits and preferences that past generations of ad men could only dream of.Andafter a failed debut in 2000-3, TiVo is talking about relaunching in the UK.

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