This AP story on DVR viewing has been syndicated everywhere, and will likely be read by 100,000x as many people as this post will, but I’ll do what I can to push back the tide of misinformation about DVRs and DVR viewing of TV shows that it includes.
Among the least time-shifted shows this fall were “Deal or No Deal,” “60 Minutes” and “King of the Hill.”
While 2 of those shows had low DVR viewing they were by no means the least time-shfited (perhaps lots of slack is allowed if you start your claim with “Among” as in “I am among the best golfers in San Francisco”) As the table below shows, it’s reasonable to include Deal or No Deal and 60 Minutes in the “among” list. Even so, the inclusion of King of the Hill in that group is a mystery, it averaged a 5.2% increase over it’s live viewing and 364,000 DVR viewers. Lots of shows had fewer DVR viewers and a lower increase.
Here are the lowest shows for % increase via DVR viewing on a season to date basis through November 16, 2008:
| Programs | Network | Persons Most Current (000s) | Persons Live (000s) | Time-shifted Audience (000s) | % increase from Live to Most Current |
| FOOTBALL NT AMERICA PT 3 | NBC | 8,799 | 8,726 | 73 | 0.8% |
| FOOTBALL NT AMERICA PT 2 | NBC | 4,945 | 4,886 | 59 | 1.2% |
| SAT NIGHT FTBL PRE-GAME | ABC | 4,970 | 4,909 | 61 | 1.2% |
| THE OT | FOX | 11,678 | 11,515 | 163 | 1.4% |
| SUNDAY NIGHT NFL PRE-KICK | NBC | 11,479 | 11,317 | 162 | 1.4% |
| NBC SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL | NBC | 16,731 | 16,442 | 289 | 1.8% |
| SAT NIGHT FOOTBALL | ABC | 7,490 | 7,358 | 132 | 1.8% |
| COPS 2 | FOX | 5,564 | 5,431 | 133 | 2.4% |
| DEAL OR NO DEAL-FRI | NBC | 5,872 | 5,728 | 144 | 2.5% |
| AMW: AMERICA FIGHTS BACK | FOX | 5,576 | 5,429 | 147 | 2.7% |
| 48 HOURS MYSTERY | CBS | 7,036 | 6,839 | 197 | 2.9% |
| AMER FUNN HOME VIDEOS | ABC | 7,635 | 7,401 | 234 | 3.2% |
| DEAL OR NO DEAL-WED | NBC | 8,165 | 7,891 | 274 | 3.5% |
| LAW AND ORDER | NBC | 7,935 | 7,660 | 275 | 3.6% |
| 60 MINUTES | CBS | 15,750 | 15,198 | 552 | 3.6% |
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What is “Most Current”? Most of the DVR Viewing numbers that we show on the site are either Live+SD (which includes DVR viewing the same day as broadcast and up to 3AM the following day) or Live+7 (which includes DVR viewing within 7 days of the air date). “Most Current” which is the only kind of season to date show data we get is a combination of the two. It includes Live+7 viewing for the dates where it is available (2+ weeks after the viewing date) and Live+SD for dates where Live+7 is not available.
With “The Office,” time-shifting has kept alive a show that might otherwise be dead. The comedy has the week’s toughest time slot, competing directly against CBS’ more popular “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Huh? The Office is NBC’s top scripted show for 18-49 adults, the idea that it has somehow been “saved” by DVR viewing is ridiculous.
The flip side is that DVRs make it harder for new shows like NBC’s just-canceled “My Own Worst Enemy” to get established. Given the choice of trying something new or watching a recorded version of a favorite show, the DVR usually wins out.
No backup for this claim at all and I have never seen anything substantiating such a claim in my close watching of DVR data. What about the new shows like The Mentalist and Fringe that have managed to do just fine? Sounds like a manufactured excuse for bad programming decisions from NBC.
“The biggest single competitor to network programming in any time slot now is (pre-recorded) network programming,” said David Poltrack, chief researcher at CBS.
Poltrack knows more about TV numbers in his pinky finger than I do in my entire body, but this is just PR spin. Today, fewer than 30% of US households have DVRs, but 50%+ of the US prime-time audience is watching cable. More denial of the loss of supremacy of broadcast over cable. “The competition is us!” is a lot more affirming than “The competition is those grubby little cable programmers!”.
There was a time, not too long ago, when network executives slept with laptops or fax machines by their beds so they could rise before dawn to check the previous night’s ratings.
Now, Ostroff said, “it’s a system that’s no longer relevant.”
Don’t believe that for a second. They still rise before dawn, because the Live viewing audience for a show correlates very closely to the C+3 commercial viewing audience they get paid for by advertisers.
The networks’ weekly ratings scorecard, a traditional psychic barometer, also means less. It’s based on live viewing, plus playbacks within 24 hours. One recent week the broadcast networks were down 10 percent from the previous year — an alarming sign of failure on its face — but add in a week’s worth of time-shifters and the decline was only 3 percent, Poltrack said.
Asked whether the increased time-shifting helped the networks, Fox chief scheduler Preston Beckman was as ambivalent as Wurtzel.
“It’s a little of both,” he said. It’s always encouraging that viewers watch the shows, whenever they do it. But advertising rates are calculated based on people who watch a show within three days of its original airing. So if you tape “House” on Tuesday to watch Saturday night, Fox gets nothing for it.
That weekly psychic barometer still means plenty. While it’s true that there is a delay in receiving the C+3 commercial ratings that really matter, they are closely correlated to the Live program ratings (which are available the next day) in most cases.
CBS’ Poltrack believes that DVR usage will continue to grow until the machines are in about half of the nation’s homes with TVs. He expects the technology to become obsolete soon after that, because more people will have televisions and computers working together to give them even more freedom to program theirpersonal networks.
And while I can’t really fault him because it’s just a guess, I don’t see any way that computer viewing of video will exceed DVR viewing anytime soon. Both are growing, and computer viewing is growing much faster, but is so tiny by comparison today that DVR viewing is likely to be more important than computer viewing for a long time.
Nielsen TV Ratings Data: ©2008 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.
I read that via a mobile news sight and thought the King of the Hill had to be wrong. I’m not a fan of deal or no Deal, but if I had to watch it DVR would be great, just get to the point when they open the cases.
Ad sales are down. There’s a Variety report on the topic today. Advertisers have valid questions regarding how time-shifting is affecting the way they do business. I know they’ve agreed on the C+3 rating – for now. Still, it’s unwise for networks to put all their eggs of explanation into the “shifting to cable” basket. Networks need to investigate every angle for lower ratings, in order to develop counter-arguements that will keep advertisers buying, in one form or another!
Not really about DVR usage in general, but I’m shocked to see Law and Order in that “lowest DVR” list. The others make sense, but for a 10 pm show that’s up against similar competition, getting only 275,000 DVR viewers is not good.
I can’t see how they can possibly say that the DVR will be obsolete and computers will take their place. The same argument is made with DVDs and movie streaming on computers. I just don’t see it. I’ve watched both movies and TV shows on my laptop. Horrible. Between the lacking quality, plus the inconsistency of playback, there is no way the general population would give up HD DVR recordings for watching the show on a smaller computer screen. I don’t buy it.
Holly, you caught a labeling error by me, and I will fix it. Those DVR viewing totals aren’t Live+7 they are “Most Current” which include Live+7 for the dates that are available and Live+SD for those not available.
So, the reason for the relatively low numbers for L&O are easily explained in that it had only run 2 episodes this season through Nov 16 and so those DVR numbers above are all “Live+SD” for it and no Live+7 at all.
clutz, I completely agree. In fact, most of what’s been quoted in the article from TV execs is easily explained by the motivation to “keep advertisers paying”.
Bill, OK, that makes much more sense now.
the disinformation will exist, perhaps forever (or at least until you can’t tell the difference between CBS’ averages and USA network’s). It seems like everyone is in on it, not just the networks, but also the agencies and even the high paid ad execs at the big companies. We hear of “whimpers and groans” but have yet to hear “BS! I call BS! I will not tolerate this BS!” It’s an interesting phenomenon.
The idea that computer viewing will outpace live and DVR viewing anytime this generation is pretty nonsensical. While anyone might watch the occasional show they missed online, giving up our giant flat screens and comfy couches and recliners for computer monitors and office chairs is just not going to happen.
More so than the ease of availability of online viewing, comfort is what determines where a person watches television. I’ve been using whatever online means are available as soon as they have become available for years and years, but I still have never watched a show online unless I didn’t have it on the DVR. Even before episodes were available online, I’d download them via newsgroups and torrents, but I’d always then burn the episodes onto video CDs (later DVDs) to watch them on my big screen while sitting in my La-Z-Boy. Once DVRs came about, I stopped watching online altogether. Even now, it’s 50/50 whether I will watch an episode online or download and burn it if I forget to set the DVR.
Let’s think this through:
1. Until 40+ inch computer moniters are available AND affordable, it’s not going to happen.
2. Once #1 happens, then it will take people rearranging how they use their computers, meaning that your office setup will need be such that you have your mouse, keyboard and chair set up 5-7 feet from your 40+ inch computer screen. Who has the room to do that?
Wait, you’d also need your CPU set up next to you, otherwise you’d need to walk across the room every time you wanted to use the CD player, or everytime your CPU locks up and you need to manually reboot (which means sixteen times a day for Vista users).
3. Until comptuers and giant televisions are completely integrated and totally wireless (meaning your living room becomes your computer room, too), this is not happening. And even then it likely won’t happen, because in most households people are not going to give up the TV so someone can play Solitaire or chat on MySpace all night long.
The technological revolution has come fast and furious, but all the major advances in the past decade are mostly speed and software related. The type of major leap Pollock is talking about in hardware is decades away. Not just because the technology needs to be developed in an affordable manner, but also because companies are designed to milk each drop of honey they can out of each new hardware advance. So even if all the advances needed came about by next Tuesday, the companies that manufacture and sell these items would release them in dribs and drabs over many, many years.
Bill has it right on the money. Pollock’s words are mainly spin combined with heaping doses of self denial.
Regarding Poltrack’s comment that DVR’s will become obsolete, I believe he was saying that would be when both beefier computers and higher bandwidth become more common in the average household, allowing users to view shows they’ve downloaded on their television (much like Apple TV currently does). Broadband providers are already moaning about “heavy downloaders” clogging the pipes and slowing down Internet traffic, so that’s a future hurdle to jump if downloading becomes more prevalent via legal or other means (such as file sharing). If Poltrack’s prediction comes true, the TV/film industry may also need to find a way to monetize file sharing (P2P exchange of TV shows), lest they run into the same problem that the music industry has for the past 10 years.
i don’t own a TV set. i use the eyeTV hybrid tuner to view my dishnetwork dvr on my mackbook pro. as soon as the news network start live streaming full time i losing my dvr
Regarding computer verses DVR: I use my computer with Windows Media Center and high definition HDHomerun dual tuner connected to my projector as my TV\Theater.
I can watch timeshifted tv, movie files and dvd on the same system. I switched to this from TiVo because TiVo doesn’t allow direct cabel connection with high definition QAM but my computer does. In five years I see this catching on in most homes. You don’t need a projector, you can connect your computer directly to your hdmi connection on your tv.
Jimony, you’re ahead of 99.9999% of US households today. In 5 years, you’ll be ahead of 99.5% of US households. Mainstream US households will use the features they get from their cable and satellite company boxes (and not necessarily all of those). Hooking up secondary boxes to their TVs will remain a niche activity for a very, very long time.
The rule is 30 years. That’s how long it takes for a technology to be completely spread throughout the population.
Well Media Center has already been available for about 8 years, so that’s only 22 years left. LOL But then again, tv on the computer with internal tv tuner cards have been out much longer than that. The advent of high definition tuners and media centers is just the latest evolution of this technology and shows the potential. Five years from now, this technology could boom big time.
But then, this is only my opinion\wishful thinking possibly.
I once stated that when 300mhz cpu’s came out that the processor wouldn’t get much higher than that until the bus speeds catch up. ROFL
I can understand where he is going with the computer/dvr watching.
I watch some shows on the tv but some shows on the computer. I will sneak in an episode of something while at work for example. I sit at my computer at home more than i do in front of the tv. I have a tv show running in a corner through internet explorer while I’m msning to someone or surfing the net in another window.
If i’m around when my show is on and i get a good connection on my tv then i’ll watch it there. Though i’m annoyed by ads and actually prefer to watch it later. I also have my computer hooked up to the tv through an hdmi cable and will watch dvd movies from there. I don’t even own a dvd player, i use it through my pc. I also play all my music through my pc and don’t own a stereo.
Probably more households have a computer and internet connection than a dvr system. Also, in a household it is starting to become more common for each person to have their own computer while still only have one major entertainment centre that has DVR capabilities. Online/TV viewing allows a lot more flexibility already and is pretty cheap. I don’t need to be comfy to catch just the hour or so of tv shows that i might watch in a day. Actually there are probably only 4 or 5 shows that i make an effort to watch, though when i’m bored i don’t sit down in front of the tv (i don’t even have cable so have limited channels) but sit in front of my computer surf around for something to watch/read/play/talk to a friend etc. You can’t really do all that in front of a tv.
Do the cable and satellite companies know exactly how many people DVR a show and when they review it? Or are they taking a statistical guess like typical ratings? For that matter, do cable and satellite companies know exactly how many of their customers view particular channels and when? How are such numbers worked into overnight ratings?
Bruce, all the TV ratings/viewing numbers we report come from Nielsen Media which uses a combination of people meters and diaries in selected homes to measure a representative sample of US TV viewers. All methods of delivery (cable, satellite, over the air) are measured.
Cable and satellite companies certainly know some viewing metrics, like which channels were viewed and for how long, how much DVRs were used, but they do not know which members of the household were doing the viewing. None of the numbers on our site, nor any you are likely to see publicly, come directly from the cable or satco’s.
Bruce, the most a cable or satellite company can know is how many households that subscribe to their cable/sat system were tuned or dvr’d show x. Whether they actually collect that information they will never reveal, because pro-privacy people would probably immediately cancel their subscriptions. The information is certainly not included in Nielsen ratings, even the DVR ratings, and they would be useless to advertisers if they were included. Advertisers want to know what demos are watching, and you can’t tell that just by seeing that X number of households watched something.
First, I’ll admit that I might not have a good sense of what’s common in terms of how people watch TV programming these days.
I’m surprised, though, at the comments here claiming that ‘computer viewing’ being common is far off. I see people here using the terms ‘TV’ and ‘monitor’ differently, but from my point of view they have been the same device for several years…basically since the HDMI connection became common. Thinking about it, I can only come up with 2 remaining properties that differentiate the two devices: TVs usually come with speakers and an NTSC or ATSC tuner, whereas monitors generally have neither. I haven’t used the internal speakers on a TV for at least 10 years, and frankly I am surprised that they still exist given how bad they usually sound and how often multichannel soundtracks are used. And regarding the tuner, most people probably use an external tuner of some sort. My point to all this is that the claims that ‘computer viewing’ entails watching on a small screen are silly. I’ve been ‘watching TV’ on monitors with computers connected to them for over 10 years now. It required some technical acumen in the late 90s, but today it’s trivial. I suspect that the majority of people under age 35 will share this view.