DVR owners don't always fast forward

[jmkeuning]

From PVR Blog

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.

[Soopafresh]

Force of habit, a bit of a break, and a chance to talk. Besides, isn't it comforting to see and hear how the VISA card will keep your daughter's wedding from being completely ruined?

[redwudz]

It gives me a chance to catch up on the commercials I may have missed during the week.

[ebenton]

I have a cable-company DVR. Fast-forward is that little sometimes-triangular button with the double-arrow symbol on it, right? The one that VCRs have had for decades? Is it the button pointing to the left or pointing to the right? duhhhh....

[vico1]

Commercials

[gadgetguy]

My first question was: How do they know if someone is using the fast forward button? Do these devices phone home and report your every activity?

But then you mentioned that the figures come from Neilson. So it's more likely they just asked the subjects in their study group. My own experience as a Neilson family left me doubting the veracity of any of their claims.

[dadrab]

So it's more likely they just asked the subjects in their study group.

You actually had it closer to right in the first place.

The guy who installed my new box Tuesday alluded to how the majority of Nielson stats are pulled directly from cable company data. True, they still have a percentage of people that keep logs and/or are polled, but they do gather data submitted by boxes back to the cable companies.

OOOOOOoooooooo. Big Brother... :P