DVR owners don't always fast forward

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DVR owners don't always fast forward

Today's New York Times carried an article about DVR fast forwarding containing numbers that surprised even me:

It turns out that a lot of people with digital video recorders are not fast-forwarding and time-shifting as much as advertisers feared. According to new data released yesterday by the Nielsen Company, people who own digital video recorders, or DVRs, still watch, on average, two-thirds of the ads.

Only 1/3 of DVR owners skip the ads? Are there a lot of DVR owners that don't know how to use the remote?

Digging deeper into the article, the 1/3 number is actually an average across all TV viewing by DVR owners, including an interesting stat: average DVR owners watch 50% of their TV live. When you take out the live TV numbers, the 1/3 that skip ads jumps to 60 percent which still feels low.

They don't mention if the owner pool is strictly TiVo, strictly cable-company DVRs, or a mixture of both, but I would bet that among DVR owners that paid for their hardware (like TiVo owners), the number that watch commercials is lower than average. If someone loves TV (and/or hates ads) enough that they plunk down $300+ dollars for a TiVo box, chances are, they're not going to waste their investment watching ads, whereas I bet most people with cable company DVRs are watching a lot of live TV, and might not get the hang of the remote/UI provided with generic TV recorders.

Personally, I might watch 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 commercials that go by, if something catches my eye, and I've found that friends and family with DVRs follow similar patterns, so these Neilsen numbers published in the NYT today seem a bit optimistic.

by Matt Haughey February 16, 2007 in News

Comments

Tired of having to fast forward through the commercials?

restore the 30 skip ahead button that tivo and comcast took out in response to advertiser pressure

the engineers, god bless them, left it in

believe me once you have remapped an unused button (i use the B button on my comcast motorola remote) to do 30 second skip ahead you will NEVER go back

it is so much better than having to watch the ads fast forward by at dizzying speed

4 clicks 2min 6 clicks 3 mins

so sweet.

here is how to restore it to tivo

http://bigmarv.net/how/tivo30secondskip.html

here is how to restore it to comcast/motorola

http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/289

http://dcortesi.com/2005/05/04/motorola-dct6412-comcast-dvr-30-second-skip/

Posted by: iceman at Feb 17, 2007 3:23:07 AM

Well, the Nielson data is crap anyway; these DVR owners aren't "watching" the commericals any more than they're watching the show. If you're really watching a show, remote in hand, then you skip or fast-forward the ads, but if you've got the TV on while you're cleaning, eating, dandling your kids, working, &c. then the ads just run. I replaced my beloved old Replay with a Series 3 TiVo and the automatic commercial skip meant that I really never saw ads - I love HD but I miss that.

Also, right, many cable consumers who got sold a DVR upgrade are probably just not using the DVR features much. Not because they're stupid, just because they don't have much invested in the additional functionality. I was in the office of a very smart MTV Networks executive last month (yes, he's still there) and he had a Time-Warner Cable DVR running a plasma showing CMT or whatever and expressed consternation that he didn't have a TiVo there - I had to tell him that he had a DVR.

Posted by: Nic Wolff at Feb 17, 2007 6:08:12 AM

I wonder if it's because newer Tivos ship with the 30 second skip turned off. Many Tivo owners aren't aware that it can be turned on so easily. Before I turned their's on, my parents would sometimes use the fast forward buttons, but usually they'd just watch the commercials. Those fast forward buttons require reflexes that my parents don't have (they never played videogames as kids).

Posted by: Marc B at Feb 17, 2007 6:40:13 AM

Your point about store-bought vs. cable company provided is a good one. Before I got my Series 3, I was stuck with a Comcastorolasoft and trying to skip commercials on it sometimes took longer than just waiting through the commercials.

Posted by: Mike D. at Feb 17, 2007 11:41:57 AM

Nic - if you believe that most people "(watch) a show, remote in hand" then I don't think you understand the average TV user's behavior. You do it, I do it. But my wife (who does have me record shows for her) doesn't. She watches more shows, attentively, than I do on my bought/assembled (not cableco-provided) DVR without ever picking up the remote or skipping commercials.

My parents, on the other hand, do auto-skip commercials via the ReplayTV functionality you mentioned.

Anyway, I would say that no one in my extended family - all of whom have DVRs - actually does active commercial skipping. My wife tried for a while but couldn't figure out the skip buttons and kept accidentally fast-forwarding into content, so she just gave up.

Given Replay's smaller numbers, I think it does add up that so few people are actually skipping commercials...

Posted by: Steve at Feb 17, 2007 1:46:35 PM

Is it me or am I reading this differently...
In the article it says: "people [...], still watch, on average, two-thirds of the ads."
To me that means that all 100% of the people polled watch 2/3 of the ads. Meaning that they don't watch all the ads but still 2/3 of them.

To me, it doesn't mean that "only 1/3 of DVR owners skip the ads."

But that might just be the sentence itself.

Anyway... I don't watch ads what so ever and I iwn a Tivo and I never watch TV live. Who would ?

Stupid people would...
;-p

Posted by: Paul Boutin at Feb 17, 2007 10:44:12 PM

I watch a fair number of ads, I just don't watch the ads that aren't interesting (funny, artistic, regarding something that interests me, etc.), and I don't watch ads I've seen ten times already. Is it 60% of the ads? I don't know, I'm not gathering statistics.

Posted by: Matthew Weigel at Feb 19, 2007 7:17:49 AM

I don't know anyone with a DVR that doesn't fast forward (or 30 second skip) through commercials.

Posted by: Jigsaw hc at Feb 19, 2007 9:43:40 AM

I think it has a lot to do with TiVo vs. Cablebox DVR, as is mentioned. TiVo users bought their device because they know what it is and they know what it does. I think they're a different market of TV watchers than Cablebox DVR users. I've been a TiVo user for probably three years now, and watching live TV is extremely rare for me. I probably watch one out of every 15 commercials.

My parents are less techy than I am, though, and they tend to watch more live TV than I do. I bought them a TiVo box, which they use in one room, while they have Cablebox DVRs in the other rooms.

Posted by: Jordan at Feb 20, 2007 10:24:21 AM

I'm a TiVo owner and a Nielsen family - a very interesting experience so far. My wife and I find that we're more cognizant of what we watch and we rarely watch TV live. Usually 15-20 minutes later to skip the ads.

Posted by: Keith at Feb 25, 2007 8:18:29 PM

I've got to tell you; I've had a DVR for about a year and a half, but I've been watching tv for three decades now. Sometimes we watch commercials when viewing the recorded shows strictly out of HABIT. As soon as we realize what we are doing, one of us will grab the remote and FF, but I think a lot of people are still watching ads because it's the way we've been trained to watch tv. DVRs are probably new to too many people for them to be in the habit of FFing yet... just a thought.

Posted by: Jimmy at Feb 26, 2007 6:29:31 AM

For me it depends on the show I'm watching. I just ran through the past week's worth of TDS, which I can watch while laptop surfing. So, sometimes the commercials start and I let 'em slide by, or it turns out they're actually interesting (that Propel water ad was great) or funny (it is the Comedy Channel, after all).

But when I'm watching BSG, Veronica Mars or Heroes I am fully focused, 'mote in hand, not wanting to waste a single iota of brainspace to anything other than the excellent storytelling in front of me.

Posted by: Susan Carley Oliver at Mar 3, 2007 10:35:34 AM

Well, Matt, for our part (I built my sister a Mythbox about 3 years ago; we're in the process of bumping the video storage to about 850GB tonight as I type), I find we tend to watch as much as 25% of the ads in the programs we record.

Perhaps we're perverts (and we *are* the sort of people who would watch the Clio's, if they televised them anywhere reasonable), but that's our datapoint.

Posted by: Baylink - http://baylink.pitas.com at Mar 29, 2007 4:08:04 PM

Some of us don't have to fast forward or have the remote in hand.

www.mythtv.org

Posted by: rothgar at Apr 24, 2007 8:11:55 AM