DVRs Likely Help, as Much as Hurt, Ad Viewing

By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor

For the television and advertising industries, the DVR continues to represent both a blessing and a challenge. By allowing viewers to time-shift shows that they are not able to watch during the original broadcast, the DVR is helping TV networks hold on to viewers who would otherwise seek out other ways to watch these shows -- or not watch them at all. 

At the same time, DVRs enable viewers to fast-forward through content that doesn’t interest them, including commercials, potentially undermining television’s long-time ad-supported business model.

But the overall impact on commercial viewing, important for viewers to the extent that advertising support defrays part of the cost of television content delivery, seems to be mixed. Viewers do watch commercials on their DVRs, though some consumers likely do use DVRs to skip commercials. Among DVR homes, playback lifts commercial ratings by 44 percent among viewers 18 to 49 after three days. In other words, commercials embedded into time-shifted programming get watched within three days of the original program airing. 

The report suggests a complicated DVR impact on commercial viewing. People actually do watch some of the commercials when they are in DVR playback mode, but not all. At the same time, playback mode is most common at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., when people could be watching shows in real time instead. 

Nielsen actually suggests that DVR owners are watching more TV and commercials overall than they otherwise would. Among homes with DVRs, the ratings of commercials for some shows, particularly younger-skewing shows on Fox and the CW, soar by more than 50 percent when played back within three days.

News and sports genres received relatively little lift from playback, since viewers generally prefer to watch these types of shows live. Feature films were the least time-shifted genre, perhaps because their availability on a growing number of platforms and distribution networks prior to the broadcast window has increased the likelihood that viewers will have already seen them.

It would therefore appear that the threat posed by time shifting is greatest for TV serials, not sports, news or movie content. 

Among the other contradictions is that time-shifting is most prevalent among younger and upscale viewers, the demographic many advertisers seek.

About 38.1 percent of U.S. homes had DVRs in September 2010. Seven in 10 households that have DVRs have only one. A quarter of households have two DVRs, and five percent have three or more.

DVRs also seem to have a complex relationship to overall TV viewing time. Households with viewers who have owned a DVR for more than a year tended to spend more time playing back TV shows. This could be because earlier adopters of the DVR are bigger TV consumers, or because they have grown comfortable using the device, Nielsen said. 

The bottom line is that DVR usage can both help and hurt viewing of TV commercials. 

(source: http://iptv.tmcnet.com/topics/iptv/articles/130347-dvrs-likely-help-as-much-as-hurt-ad.htm)