via THR:

TiVo said time-shifted ratings among its users spiked 75% during the 10 minutes Letterman confessed his sexual dalliances during his Oct. 1 show. That compares to a lift of only 20% among live viewers.

Read the full story

Big Brother (or in this case little brother, since TiVo only makes up about 10% of the DVRs) is watching.   Several data tables below, and I scrolled right down to them.  On a glace it seems that TNT’s The Closer could be the best way to unify a partisan nation.

TIVO EXAMINES TV VIEWERSHIP BEHAVIOR BASED ON POLITICAL PARTY AFFILIATION USING ITS POWER||WATCH™ RATINGS SERVICE IN JULY

Highlights how True Targets^TM data affords advertisers a better understanding of television behavioral segments and can help significantly improve consumer targeting and ROI

No Republicans watched a second of Olbermann, No potential alternative fuel vehicle buyers watched a second of O’Reilly in July

ALVISO, Calif. — October 5, 2009 — TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services and advertising solutions for digital video recorders (DVRs), today highlighted how leveraging the combination of an opt-in panel with set-top-box viewing data, such as TiVo’s Power||Watch™ ratings service, can help provide the media industry with more precise information for reaching households that best match the target audience for specific marketing messages.

Read the full story

Keep in mind this is from a story driven by  TiVo PR, and that TiVo users are only about 10% of the nation’s DVR owners, and quite likely have different usage patterns.

The fact that fewer people might DVR Leno vs. the NBC 10pm hour last season would tend to relatively boost NBC’s 10pm Live+SD ratings, which is what we (and everybody else) typically reports except in stories specifically about DVR viewing. Reducing DVR viewing of the 10pm hour was one of NBC’s stated objectives with The Jay Leno Show.

Time-shifted viewing of NBC’s “The Jay Leno Show” among TiVo users is below the network’s year-ago levels for 10 p.m. programming, but it eats more into the network’s 11 p.m. viewership, including “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien,” according to DVR pioneer TiVo Inc.

After two weeks on the air, an average of 46% of the show’s TiVo subscriber audience opted to record it and watch it later, it found. That compares to an average of 70% of time-shifted viewing of NBC programs in the 10 p.m. slot last season. This has also resulted in less time-shifting for NBC thus far this season at 10 p.m. when compared with other broadcast networks, TiVo said.

via THR.com.

Update:  Julia’s comment below made me to decide to go look at the actual press release from TiVo.  The New York Times indeed used some curious word choices both. in its headline, and in the story with regard to “hit” and “most popular”.  The actual press release as titled by TiVo was  Emmy Gold Not Necessarily a Silver Bullet for Advertisers, According to TiVo

–

The New York Times has a story up on how people with TiVos mostly don’t watch commercials and even more skip commercials in hit dramas.  But I had to smile at the show they used in the graphic, especially since the story was titled “Hit TV Shows Have Most-Skipped Ads“:

The most popular television programs had the least-watched commercials, TiVo reported last week. The company said that nearly all of the television shows that won 2009 Emmys showed higher levels of ad-skipping than the averages for their respective genres. The sole exception was “30 Rock,” 64 percent of whose audience skipped the commercials, as opposed to 66 percent for all sitcoms generally.

Awards aren’t exactly the same thing as checks, as this has been going on a long while now, and will go on a while longer.   But here’s the latest.  TiVo won a court order that according to the judge will result in about $200 million in damages from Dish Network and EchoStar.  This has dragged out a while now, and TiVo was actually requesting $1 billion (one billion dollars!) which the Judge said was unreasonable.

Dish and EchoStar said they were pleased the judge rejected Tivo’s request to award the larger amount and that it found that any violation of the injunction was not willful.

“While we disagree that any amount of sanctions was warranted, the decision confirms our belief that we designed around Tivo’s patent in good faith. We believe that we ultimately will prevail on appeal,” the company said.

-Via WSJ

TiVo. the synonym for DVR is increasingly a footnote in a market it helped create.   TiVo is down to 3 million subscribers. With more than 30 million DVR homes in the US, that’s less than 10% of the market.

How sad for TiVo, its two best business models at this point seem to be its fledgling data service and lawsuits.  So far for TiVo though even when they win the lawsuits, as they have with DISH,  the appeals process is endless.

Read the full story

More statistics the TV networks hate to hear, but it’s no surprise to see more data supporting the logical notion that people with DVRs fast-forward through commercials or skip them all together.   It’s also no surprise to hear TiVo users bypassed as much as a whopping 84% of the commercial time (the Grey’s Anatomy episode on May 7).

That data nugget is out as part of a TiVo campaign to champion a new metric it has created for its data services:  the “pure program rating”.  Though TiVo has  an increasingly tiny share of the  roughly 34 million homes with DVRs in them, it certainly has enough users to create some interesting data.  TiVo has made a lot of top ten “pure program” rating data available — both live and time-shifted viewing as well the most-watched individual commercials in May in its press release (here, in a PDF file).

Read the full story

There are a lot of interesting numbers in this TiVo press release. I’m not sure there are any particularly meaningful ones, but that’s more in the eye of the beholder.

While Grey’s Anatomy has more TiVo season pass (automatic recording of all episodes) subscribers, we know that American Idol is the most watched shows on all DVRs. That likely indicates more about TiVo subscriber (about 3 million out of a US DVR population of over 30 million) behavior than anything else. The fact that TiVo subscribers behave differently from the general population is probably not great for TiVo’s data sales efforts.

via press release:

TiVo Evaluates the Top Season Pass(TM) Programs in April Using Stop||Watch(TM) Ratings Service

Identifies the Highest, Lowest Rated Season Pass Programs Actually Viewed by Subscribers

Highest Viewed Commercial, Among Both Total and Timeshifted Viewers, Aired in Program Outside Top 10

Read the full story