DVR Ad-Skipping: Urban Legend?
Many industry officials, journalists and analysts have suggested that owners of Digital Video Recorders will watch the majority of primetime shows after they originally air.
Why?
1. They are too busy when the program is broadcast. 2. They want to be able to fast-forward past the commercials, which is easily done when the show has been recorded.
However, I have said repeatedly that the industry consensus is wrong. Most Americans will still prefer to watch their favorite shows when they are scheduled. Consequently, I believe that claims that DVR ad-skipping will dramatically change the advertising industry are overrated. Most people will still watch the commercials.
Today, a new study backs up my analysis. The Total TV Audience Monitor, a research firm based in New Jersey, says only one-fourth of DVR owners actually watch recorded shows during the week. In addition, only six percent of all DVR viewing is 'time-shifted.'
If the study is correct (and I am correct), it begs a question:
Why are so many people saying that most DVR owners rarely watch the commercials?
There are two reasons for that as well:
1. Most industry analysts (and tech journalists) are more tech savvy than the average TV viewer. They are more likely to skip the ads so they assume that everyone else will. But it's not true.
2. Advertisers are purposely trying to create the perception that DVR owners are skipping ads so they can coerce the networks to lower their advertising rates.
But it seems to this observer that rampant DVR ad-skipping has become one of the great urban legends of our time.
To learn more about the study, click Here
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Phillip Swann is president and publisher of TVPredictions.com. He has been quoted in dozens of publications and broadcast outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Inside Edition, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Associated Press and The Hollywood Reporter. He can be reached at swann@tvpredictions.com or at 703-505-3064.
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1 Comments:
Almost all of my television viewing is of DVRed programs... and I watch a lot of television. While the primary reason for using a DVR is to time shift, ad skipping is not an optional part of the experience. By skipping the ads I can watch three shows in the time it would normally take to watch two. Even if I find a show that I want to watch right them and there, I will hit pause and go do something else so it can build up a buffer that I can use to skip the ads. I wonder how many of the “live” viewing audience is doing this as well?
The thing to remember is that even if they made ad skipping illegal and found some magical way to take that ability away from us... I would then simply have to drop back to the old school version of ad skipping. I would go make a sandwich, hit the lavatory, read a book, work on my laptop, do some housecleaning, draw a picture, chat with whomever else is there... what I won’t do is watch the commercials.
This isn’t a political statement on my part, I am a capitalist pig from way back, it is simply that commercials are uniformly uninteresting and uninformative in the extreme. They neither entertain nor educate so what possible reason would anyone have to watch them?
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