Slashdot Mirror
Women Control the DVR
JeiFuRi writes "While men normally hog the remote, a new study commissioned by Lifetime suggests that women are more likely to be in charge of their DVRs . Results from a survey of 1000 married woman say that 48 percent made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own and 55 percent claimed they understood the system more than their husband. Three-quarters of the women surveyed said that the reason they fell in love with DVR is that they are extremely intuitive and much easier than a VCR." The study also found some interesting things about DVR users' ad-watching habits.
And a study commissioned by ESPN found that men control the dvr.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
My mom would probably say that she understands a DVR doesn't mean she does. My sister recently fubared the home network with a WiFi router, and claims that no it couldn't possibly cause a problem, with great authority. She doesn't even know what an IP address is. Women especially with technology if they use it enough to get by will claim they're experts.
Women also say they are the smarter sex. Since when does it matter that they "say" they know the DVR better. Everyone knows guys are television experts.
While 99 percent of women say they use their DVRs to zap through commercial spots, 76 percent reported that they stopped for ads that are entertaining or relevant to their own interests. Women are also more likely to pause for TV and movie promos.
"DVRs give them a mechanism to find commercials that are relevant, and that's a big message," Brooks said. "It's not that people don't want commercials, it's irrelevant interruptions that turn them off."
Ok, that is a big hint to the tv industry. Women do not want irrelevant commercials, but are willing to watch and advertisement that they are interested in. Unfortunately for the tv industry, I don't think men want commercials at all...
Also FTA:
The study, which was commissioned by Lifetime,
Lifetime, the network for women, is saying, "ADVERTISE HERE! WOMEN WATCH COMMERCIALS!"
See, there's a slant to everything.
Keith
This surprises me because among my friends with DVRs, it was the guys who decided to get it, and who hog that remote too. Maybe my friends are the exception? But I'm glad to hear that more women are getting into technology. It's for everyone, so everyone should enjoy it.
First post?
I guess this means that they dont control their PVRs... hmm are they both the same thing? I would assume they are. Anyways, i know my woman doesnt control my DVR, as she doesnt know much about controlling a computer :P
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
This doesn't surprise me at all.
My wife and I have had cable for the last 6 years. I noticed and interesting difference in viewing patterns between us. I found that I tend to watch channels but she watches programs. I'll turn on the TV and watch news, documentary or sports channels and I'm not too fussy, I'll surf between the 4 documentary channels until I find something interesting and watch it. Her viewing decisions are made from looking at the program guide, the clock, recommendations from her friends and womens magazines and then decide what and when to watch. She will actually plan to watch a particular program (amazing I know). I don't think I've done that in years. A PVR would only improve her viewing convenience but it would make no difference all to mine.
It doesn't seem surprising to me that women would then control the PVR.
I could of told you this without any 'fancy' study..
:(
Yeah.. my Tivo is filled with my wife's crap...
She has to rewind every single time she misses the most miniscule piece of irrelevent dialog. Can't we just watch the show thru one time first?
Wake up.
"While 99 percent of women say they use their DVRs to zap through commercial spots,"
... or maybe they will, and they'll finally invent the Blipvert! I'd tolerate blipverts if it meant that less time per show was spent on ads. Currently it's about 15-19 minutes per hour.
Goes to show you how many people actually watch ads. I bet the percentage for men is the same. Slobbering ad executives still won't get it.
"A full 94 percent of those who said they fast forwarded commercials said they could still recognize brands and products as they zapped through the spots."
It's that whole "electrically charged exploding dude" side-effect that kinda worries me..
forgive me, some will think this is "sexist" but deep down you all know its true:
Men hunt, women gather.
Give women the opportunity to browse and pick the best [whatever] and they'll do it better than any man. A DVR does this. You can schedule things in advance, wait for them to come in, and pick the fruit when its ripened.
channel surfing without a DVR is similar to hunting. you browse, you pick a target, and you strike at it by putting the remote down. decision made, decision executed, finality. man stuff.
mod me down if you disagree, but before you do, give it some thought. its not as wrong as society would like you to believe.
Due to a strange mis-wiring in thier brains, women are only able to watch one television show at a time.
A shocking handicap, I know, but true.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Women control the DVR 'cause us guys are out working while they're watching 'Oprah.' Then they use the DVR to catch 'Ellen' when they're napping.
What is your penile percentile?
You all know what I am talking about -- these DVRs have minds of their own. They are becoming sentient.
Commissioned by Lifetime? As in the Lifetime channel? As in the only place you can find back to back shows about brave women escaping from the oppression of absuive husbands and self-empowering talk programming about taking back the household by asserting your interior decorational dominance?
Lifetime... Television for Women? That Lifetime? And they say that women now control DVR? You don't say!
I certainly tries to remain objective, but Lifetime releasing a study like this seems about as ridiculous as their programming. What kind of a polling sample is 1,000 people on a NATIONAL basis
It doesn't matter how big your hard drive is, it's how you use it.
Last time I checked, Lifetime also conducts studies in order to improve the veracity of their television shows. According to their studies, 90% of married women are beaten by their husbands and 10% of those women kill/brutally maim their husbands and/or steal the children and run away.
Hmmmm.
Why does Lifetime care anyways? All their shows are the same so nobody really bothers recording them.
Because they didnt check the hidden system folder with all the videos the husband has.
"Honey why does our recording thingy say it is out of space" "Oh you know those hard drives arent built like they used to be, must be uh, bad sectors , Ill move all of my I mean ill move in another hard drive."
There is truth in humor.
Namely, the other half of the numbers. 48% of women asserted x. 55% of women responded y. Okay, interesting, but what does this have to do with sex differences? The study included men and women in roughly equal proportions, but no comparison is made to the men.
If someone could dig up the whole story, your efforts would be appreciated.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. -Bernard Berenson
Yeah, between the PBS sewing shows, hospital dramas, and all 42 variants of CSI... I'd say my wife pretty much controls our Tivo.
Then this spring I bought a second one for the spare room, but now my daughter has managed to fill that one with her stuff! I can't win...
#DeleteChrome
(Dildo Vibrator Reamer) That's what a woman is in charge of. Making me feel so inadequate about my human sized member...member of the club....I'm cutting it off now. Girl (myself)....I'll be a woman soooon!
Of course, the fact that a DVR doesn't have any tape to rewind wouldn't be relevant, right?
Lifetime
Propoganda for Women.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
...I used my last mod point not more than 2 minutes ago and the Flamebait-potential of this story is astronomical. ;)
I'll have my fun yet!
This sig rocks the casbah.
Damn, two weeks spent trying to set up MythTV and all I had to do was ask my mom.
Men can't think straight when they have hard-ons. Women were naturally selected to bear offspring and nurse them.
-- Not a
My wife has like 4 or 5 directivos, 3 dish500s, a motorola DCT-5200 digital cable pvrs, and a few standalone tivos hooked up to 4dtv satellite recievers. Not to mention the DVB-S card in our home server. She even wrote special software, so they would all coordinate with each other, and not try to record something another DVR was already recording. With a terabyte fibre channel backend. It's kinda scary. She's even thinking of doing an episode guide database ala imdb, just so she can have better descriptions in the slice info.
Oh wait, that's me. She can't turn the tv off with the universal remote.
Suppose a man and a woman have the exact same knowledge of a DVR. Ask the woman if she "understands" it, and she'll take it to mean if she can use it the way it's intended to be used.
The man is more likely (IMHO) to interpret "understand" as knowing how the machine works: filesystems, video codecs, operating systems, I/O, etc etc. People are less likely to know that.
It was a steep learning curve, but within a few weeks I was recording shows like a big dog. Eventually, my recording tapered off to a low level after the novelty wore off.
However, once she realized the power of the PVR, my wife really got into the thing. Within a couple of months, she became a wizard at navigating and scheduling programs. Now she schedules at least 80% of the shows.
Meanwhile, I'm getting a taste of life as a sysadmin. Now if that box ever goes down, the disk runs out of space, or the MythTV backend gets hosed, it's got to be fixed ASAP. Sure she could revert to the old VCR, but all of a sudden, using it has become archaic and inconvenient.
I used to boast about how many hours of video we'd be able to crunch to MPEG4 and store on DVDs; now I'm stuck proving that statement by saving out every hour of figure skating competition that happens anywhere on the planet.
Oh well, at least I'm appreciated as the provider of this cornucopia of video clips.
The study also found some interesting things about DVR users' ad-watching habits.
From TFA:
While 99 percent of women say they use their DVRs to zap through commercial spots, 76 percent reported that they stopped for ads that are entertaining or relevant to their own interests. Women are also more likely to pause for TV and movie promos.
This is in some way surprising? 99% of respondents saying they don't want to watch ads on TV they're paying for? That 76% of them say they watch commercials they find amusing? That people are more likely to watch commercials that flog products they would actually use?
I don't get how this is in any way unexpected....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
And I have my wife's permission to say so!
Interesting finding, the question is how high is it in terms of external validity...can we generalize it to the entire population that owns DVRs? In the beginning my wife thought that having a DVR ( I was one of the first customers to get one from TWCNYC) was just another manifestation of my nerdiness, however in less than a week my wife felt in love with the DVR ...as of this writing she still says that it baffles her or how we were able to live with it :-)
55% of the gender more likely to remain home during the day know more about the DVR!!! This was worth the $x spent determining it.
Yeah girls may be using DVR's but thats because the guys have figured out BitTorrent. We are really one step ahead!
There has been a lot of concern about DVRs destroying the advertising model TV is based on. I don't think that will happen. I did take the time to reprogram my comcast dvr remote to add the 30 second skip feature (http://dcortesi.com/2005/05/04/motorola-dct6412-c omcast-dvr-30-second-skip/) but I watch a LOT more TV now then I did before I got a DVR, and while I regularly skip the commercials, I don't every time and I'm pretty sure the extended amount of time I spend in front of the TV more than makes up for the number of commercials that I do skip.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
women are smarter than men.
Well, in general at least.
Most idiots don't have a clue but claim they do. That's why so many people get hurt or ruin things doing DIY. Where as the true experts who do know what they are doing get so sick of the idiots they end up not caring for what they know about.
So sure Mrs. Smith might claim she knows how something works, but I claim to know how a clock works yet have no clue beyond "cogs and stuff" (to put it as simple as possible).
To claim knowledge does not mean you have it. It means you claimed it.
I like muppets.
...news at 11.
Now, what features do their husbands have that these women DON'T understand how to interface with?
John
My first instinct is to say, well naturally, we control everything... But I don't control a DVR, I don't even have one. I much prefer my capture card.
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." Albert Einstein
From TFA: In a national survey of 1,000 DVR users divided equally by sex, 48 percent of married women say the decision to purchase a DVR was their own, while 55 percent of the wives claim they understood how to interface with their unit's myriad features better than their husbands."
My guess at what the men said: "48 percent of married men say the decision to purchase a DVR was their own, while 55 percent of the husbands claim they understood how to interface with their unit's myriad features better than their wives."
Why don't the numbers add up to 100%? Because the husbands and wives don't always agree on what exactly happened in any given situation.
but I'm still the only one with root passwd on my mythbox.
What does Nickelodeon think???
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
so is it me... or do these statistics seem normal? i mean, the results are 50% men and %50 women, when taking the margin of error into consideration.
as usual slashdot proves to be the boys club that it is. you little sexists need to grow up. its not funny you ignorant pricks. sexism actually affects people. step outside yourselves for once (i know its hard to do in the hyper-individualist and egocentric geek culture)
p.s. this is not a troll. im serious.
While this was a legit news article, posting it on Slashdot seems to bring out the worst in the misogynist pigs. Really, what worth does it have on Slashdot? There are plenty of technically literate women, and those of us who have made careers out of IT, a male dominated field, take offense to comments like "Women only use DVRs because they're not smart enough to use BitTorrent like their husbands."
> "55 percent claimed they understood the system > more than their husband." I understand my current DVR (DirecTivo) at least as well as I understand my husband, but the previous system I maintained (MythTV) turned out to be almost as bewildering to me as women are to some Slashdotters. Ellen
I think a lot of people are confusing the intent of the article when it speaks of woment "understanding" the technology. Whenever you speak of a particular product, keep in mind there are nearly an infinite layers of "understanding" one might have.
To a user, "understanding" means knowing how to fully unitilize a product's features. This is not a completely illegitimate point of view. Software engineers think that they understand the DVR because they know how the code works. I'm guessing that hardware engineers could make a pretty good case that, compared to them, the software engineers don't really "understand" the machines either. It's also a pretty good bet that marketing and advertising executives think that they "understand" the DVR, since they know how it's positioned in the marketplace, etc, etc.
You get the point... Understanding is in the mind of the beholder.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
55% means women control it? Who failed math?
while 55 percent of the wives claim they understood how to interface with their unit's myriad features better than their husbands.
Wow. 55 percent of women say they "inferface" better with their DVR than they do with their husbands?
...that said that a good percentage of studies conducted in the last few years are all lies. There are three kinds of lies dear boys and girls:
1. Lies
2. Damn lies
3. Statistics
Your post says 1000 MARRIED women while the study says 1000 DVR users divided equally by sex.
This is a key point here:
a. You're surveying both men and women (which might seem obvious, but not from your post) - which is important because you're trying to claim to compare men and women habits - right? You can't do that if you only survey women.
b. You're surveying a specific slice of people: those who bought DVRs - this already profiles the people you're surverying: certain income range, certain education, affiliation with technology, and so on...
What's my point? Your post suggests that you can deduce on women vs men in general (see 'hunter-gatherer' post above...) - which is wrong: the target slice in society your "studying" is a specific group with very specific characteristics, and I don't think you can project from it on the whole group. The conclusions the survey makes can only be safely applied to DVR owners.
What your post suggests is quite different than the origianl article.
Dan
While men are at work, their wives are likely at home recording their husbands favorite shows for them. And everyone said that technology would make a woman's work easier, imagine that.
Yea, cant afford cable right now. But watching network TV sucks except for Fox just for their primetime shows. But yea, I watch programs and channels basically the same amount. When I did have cable, my remote has a surf button that is basically like preset's on a radio. I had the presets set to : The History channel, The Discovery Channel, G4TechTV, Comedy Central, TLC, SpikeTV, and ESPN. And I would just watch stuff in between those channels, and if nothing good was on ( or their were reruns, which happens in the daytime with cable ) I would flip to the movie networks. Now that I cant afford cable right now due to the lack of a job, I have to sit back and watch network TV, for which the most part sucks.
I hear you brother. There is no doubt about it, the VCR was mine, now my wife is hassling me to get a DVR, and she will own it. Maybe it would still be the case with VCR's if there were no DVR technology - maybe it just took women 12 years to figure out how to use it. If I had time to think about it I am sure I could figure out the answer, but right now I have to get back to washing the clothes and doing the dishes.
"Three-quarters of the women surveyed said that the reason they fell in love with DVR is that they are extremely intuitive and much easier than a VCR.""
Think about it. Women (And many Americans, male and female), back in the day of the VCR, couldn't figure out how to set the clock. (P.S. I wonder if this is why most DVD's players don't have a clock. Sure you don't need a clock on a DVD player
If given a TV properly hooked up to a VCR, and the remote for the VCR, and nothing else, you should be able to SET THE CLOCK within five minutes. If you can't, you should be shot.
And we are giving these people MORE technology? I think there is a strong argument that people don't deserve to get the new tech toys if you can't understand simple things like setting the clock on the vcr.
I remember back in the day when I used to watch a lot of the Annenburg-CPB Channel (Sue me. I can't get enough of The Mechanical Universe and its simple HS level calculus applied to physics AND Mireille in "French in Action."),
They used to advertise a show and the clip they showed was interesting and I always got a kick out of it:
A bunch of college grads (All disciplines), at graduation, were handed a simple light bulb, ONE wire, and a battery, and asked to light up the bulb (basically create a very basic circuit).
All but one showed couldn't do it. They even said it was impossible. After we saw one guy figure it out, they'd cut to a professor asking (paraphrasing),
"If college educated graduates don't even understand the basics of electricity, what does that say about a society that tremendously relies on electricity?"
I am even suggesting that most people should be allowed near a computer, until they get a good understanding of it (hardware and software). That, however, would have the impact of putting Best Buy's rip off techies, "The Geek Squad," out of business.
I have the PVR I built myself, women can claim to be experts on the simpler DVR, I think they were designed to be female proof. If by expert they mean turn on/off and adjust the volume level and fast forward through the commercials.
Guys can care less about the commercials, we don't need tv advertisements to tell us which products we need/want. When's the last time you saw a commercial for AMD or Maxtor or Acer notebooks? Never? It's Intel and their blue people and gateway with their running delivery staff and Dell with their $400 plain black towers and cheap 60Hz flat pannels(monitor not included).
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
When hunting you have some target.
I get up before dawn, put on Woodland pajamas, douse the living room in consumer urine, power on the telly and sit for hours, silent and motionless behind the couch, waiting to spot that elusive creature: the ten-point news program.
My weapon of choice? A Sony Universal with rechargeable AA Ni-MH rounds at 1.5V.
And an eight-inch call that goes "market share! market share!"
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
My wife digs certain soap opera's and follows them religiously. Since they are on during her working hours, time-warping is the only way to see them. They are like a drug.
Table-ized A.I.
I could not believe my ears when I was at Fry's one day and my wife asked me about TiVo and why we didn't have one.
So I asked her to repeat herself and she did. She then wondered if I had ever heard of one and I replied that I certainly did know what one was - but with the lifetime service and the cost of the unit, it would be nearly $500 when we were done with it.
She seemed disappointed. I was again in shock. Why the hell was she interested in a piece of "geek gear"? The answer was: Oprah talked about it one day and said how neat it was.
I then replied "Did Oprah talk about how cool those new 2.5GHz Powermacs are? The ones with the new huge cinema displays?
All that got me was a dirty look. Still, by the end of the month we had a new TiVo. And TiVo - it's TV HER way.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Here we have a Slashdot article about women, and nowhere in here does it mention how I can get a date? What the hell is this??
Well after reading the article, I'd say that this does nothing to prove or disprove anything.
Taking a statictic on a person's opinion is not scientific in the least, heck it might not even be proper measurement.
I'm suprised that only 55% of women believed that they knew more about thier DVR than thier husbands. That number seems a bit low to me, after all, this isn't a compentency test, it's a test about belief. I'd wager that 100% of all women believe that they can navigate to and from the grocery store quicker than their husbands, even though they both live in the same house, know where the nearest grocery store is located, and probably would take the exact same route.
It doesn't even matter what the men thought, because it's still playing around with perception testing, which is interesting if you want to gather information about a perception. However, perceptive information isn't consistent amonst members within a population (even a very homogenous population) so I doubt this information will have any pratical application other than sensationalisim.
Results from a survey of 1000 married woman say that 48 percent made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own and 55 percent claimed they understood the system more than their husband
In a survey of 5,000 men, approximately 0% admitted to not understanding how a DVR system works, even those who had never heard of it before.
Similarly, 100% of men made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own. 98% then asked their wives' permission to spend the money and/or have that ugly thing be on the entertainment center.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
i would like to see a study on what percentage of scheduled vcr recordings are done by women. my mom would used to always record tv dramas and soap operas on tape so that she can watch them later. for me, i just watched whatever's available on tv at the moment and hardly ever use the vcr to record and watch later.
HD Trailers
nowhere in here does it mention how I can get a date?
Whoa there, cowboy. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. First you'll need a shower, then we can work on that habit of saying "nyrrrrrr" between phrases. Then another shower just to be on the safe side. Then you get to decide which of Excelsior, Enterprise, and Exeter gets disconnected from the network so we can move it to a closet.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
..and pass her the remote while you're at it.
Living at the edge--of a continent?
Lifetime says most women understand their Tivo system better than their husbands.
I wonder what percentage of these take-charge independent wives feigned absolute helplessness at the prospect of hooking the unit up.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
My wife has control of my DVR and all I find on it are episodes of Dr Phil and Oprah!!! Please help me!!!!!!!!!
something that you can get a women to use
something that they can work out for themselves
naturally - i aint going to tell my misses that i know how to use the freeking thing - next she will have me programing in the next 6 months of 'fiends' for recirding - i was more then happy to forget to record that stuff with the vcr - if its really important she will remember to record it herself!
this is quite simple. a vcr is the absolute worst in UI. therefore, to do more than play, stop etc, one must read this strange beast called the manual. DVRs provide relatively well though out GUIs that are reasonably straight forward. therefore, it is easy to do 99% of tasks. ask those women how to swap/format/defrag the harddrive and they're stumped. dvrs have just raised the level of the bleeding obvious to the point where hte average user does nothing else
It's nice to see that about a third of the posts so far comprise men bashing women or women bashing men.
Thank goodness for the recent craze of collecting data by gender, race, etc. Nothing better to forge a difference where none significant had existed, generalise it to every member of the group, and use it as a platform to further something silly.
(Or you can just not take it seriously...)
...does the lovely Kathleen Taco agree?
This sig rocks the casbah.
"Results from a survey of 1000 married woman say that 48 percent made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own and 55 percent claimed they understood the system more than their husband." I'm sure that those 55% also claim they understood having a penis better than their husband as well. The things women claim they know and what they DO know are two entirely different things.
In a week and a half, my friend has gone from practically tech-illiterate to Mistress of Sky+, so that she can watch every episode of Most Haunted the box can find in one room while her boyfriend watches sport in the other. He was the one who wanted Sky+ in the first place, but she's the one making the most use of the box!
You must think in Russian.
It may take a woman to ask for directions, but it takes a man to understand them.
paintball
Up next on Lifetime.. "True Stories of Cancer Babies in Danger from Mad, Unfaithful Husbands"
Now that I know this, I would like a lot more commercials about:
- Feminine products that reduce the frequency of menstraul cycles
- Public service announcements regarding the importance of the low oil pressure indicator light
- The How-To's of toilet use: Look at toilet before use. If the seat is up, lower it, without comment.
- Getting what you want by actually saying what you want
- Weight Loss Success with the Microwaveable Frozen Food diet
- Beer: The new Slim Fast
- Top 10 Health Benefits of Breast Implants
- New Cure for Erictile Dysfunction: The Silent Treatment
I mean, since I'm fast forwarding through these things anyway, might as well give relevant information to the people actually watching the commercials.
paintball
Anybody got a documentary on how to get your wife to steal the children and run away?
paintball
What ! ?... I too care about relevant commercials - like how drinking Vud Blight beer will make Jay Leno look like Angelina Jolie. Or how I can overcompensate for the size of my ..uhmm.. nose with a new SUV which I can drive through two blocks to my office.
But yeah, I don't want to watch another AD on bathing soap or toothfloss... They're just not relevant.Not to be sexist or anything, life of a housewife is often one of reaction rather than plans and action. Just when my mother sits down to watch TV, my sister asks for help with her homework or I fall down off a tree or bicycle (this is about 9 years back.. btw). I can understand if she had more say in buying a DVR :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Haha I submitted the article with the title 'Women control the Magic Wand in Most Relationships', i guess the editors didn't like that :P
Until she uses it 10 times in a row to try to make out that ONE WORD she keeps missing!
Make a geek version quick! Make it difficult to understand, use buzzwords .. instead of "record video" it should be "register video on hdd" and instead of "play" it should be "play file now", that should scare them from alienating your DVR !
Act now, write now to your favorite DVR maker!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
While we don't have a DVR, we do have an AVR, or Analog video recorder. Also know as a VCR. My girlfriend uses it all the time to tape shows that she doesn't want to miss. I on the other hand don't worry so much about missing shows, and rarely tape anything. I like some shows and watch a fair amount of TV, but I generally don't care if I miss an episode.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A study by Lifetime is going to show a bias towards women.
Now I can tell you that my wife probably uses the PVR more than I do but I built it (mythtv) so I think I understand it a little. I just have less time to sit in front of the TV and watch anything.
"Honey, tape the game for me.... then go get me a beer... and then make me dinner." Seems to me like their in control of the DVR. //just kidding, karma killing
Amazingly enough I went ahead and got a DVR so I could record all my Sci-Fi and Comedy Central stuff and what not and I was amazed at how quickly her General Hospital recordings filled up the entire thing! And I have found that deleting any of those said GH recordings has severe consexquences!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
She may be the operator of the DVR, but I have root on it.
And I have root on her.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
"...with rechargeable AA Ni-MH rounds at 1.5V."
NiMH chemistry is a nominal 1.2 volts per cell, not 1.5 volts (as alkaline would be, for example).
...and in other news, a new study commissioned by Spike TV suggests that men are better than women.
I'm sure the women is only in control of the functions the man has showed them how to use(several times)....
Look honey....it just won't record "Not without my daughter part 6: Afganistan" because the title is too long.....honest....
This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that more women stay home than men, would it? She's better with the DVR because she's with it all day.
study shows that 1/3 of studies are nonsense
/.
here on
i mean, sorry if this redundant, but this IS Lifetime holding this study here. That's like OSDN running a study finding that 70% of Internet users use Linux.
55 percent claimed they understood the system more than their husband.
And I'm sure we can take them at their word.
They obviously didn't interview anybody with kids! If you have kids, then it's not man or woman who rules the DVR, it's the kids. Sure one of you might do the grunt work on the DVR to set it to record, but you'll be setting it to record Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer. And there's a good chance you won't even be trusted to do that. Once their a couple of years old, they can do it much better than you can. Their superior hand-eye coordination also allows them to fast forward through commercials at maximum speed without ever having to rewind because they went to far.
From the summary:
"48 percent [of women] made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own"Who allowed these women to make decisions for themselves? Next thing we know they'll be allowed to drive. Or vote. Mark my words, this is the start of a terrible slide into a bottomless pit of immorality.
Well, I hope so anyway.
...She Who Must Be Obeyed bought me a Tivo for Christmas this year. She really liked it....soon the only shows on the to do list were hers....I just bought her her own Tivo (so I can possibly get mine back).
Put a Tivo in front of a woman, give her five minutes of operating instructions, and stand back. She'll have the disk full before you know it.
I'm not really a CPA, I just play one on TV
"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out." -- Montaigne
minutes after I post a rambling entry, the above is the slashdot quote. i'm impressed.
un burrito me trampeó.
When hunting you have some target. You have to have a particular target in order to set the PVR.
When browsing particular channels, on the other hand, you trust that certain memorized areas will bear fruit. Sounds like a gatherer's approach to me.
Actually, when hunting you don't have a single target in mind. You just have a single category. Such as when "Bear Hunting" you're setting your eyes on a specific species but not necessarily a specific breed (Could wind up with a Black Bear, Grizzly, or Brown Bear...just an i.e.). When I turn on the TV for channel surfing, I'll shoot for a category, such as "News". With "Bear Hunting," using experience, I know where the bear are going to tend to gather for food, shelter, etc. Likewise, I know that CNN, MSNBC, different local stations, etc all have news, some 24 hours a day, some at specific times... Based on the time of day and channel location I may be able to get a specific "breed" of news. So surfing between the news chanels if one hops over to a subject that I like, I have the target. If the subject turns to something I couldn't care less about, I resume the "hunt" for more of the subjects that intrest me.
Using the DVR Method, however, is more like running a farm. You can schedule all your programs to record for the week, like timing the seeds to all bear fruit at the same general time for harvest. Then on the weekend (or any other day you have off) you can 'harvest and gather' the shows you recorded during the week. With this method, you know exactly which show you are getting. Like you'd be getting the same Red Delicious Apples you planted and not Granny Smiths.
I'm not sure if this'll clarify the analogy for you any, or if there was realy any point in me breaking it down this way, but I'm just bored as hell at work waiting for a customer, and had no better things to do. Sad, Isn't it.
I needed a fun summer project, so I built myself a Mythtv box out of some spare hardware. After getting everything together and working I showed my girlfriend what it could do and she stole it from me. I'd say 80% of the shows recorded on there are her doing. Then one day I tried upgrading to a new version of software and some dependencies broke. I didn't hear the end of it until I got it back up and running again. So, now my fun summer project is the "do not touch" box.
In our house we have a simple system: I program the DVR, and she chooses what to watch when we sit down together. That way we're both watching something that we want: I only program the DVR with shows that would appeal to me.
I am sure that there is no hidden agenda behind Life Time Networks conducting a survey in which it shows that women control the PVR in the household. Tune in to Lifetime sometime and see what their programmering is like. The honest truth is that all of us have agendas. All companies, interests groups, and politico types conduct polls/surveys and present them in the most positive light (Microsoft).
As much as these surveys can be interesting to draw a conclusion about the mindset of a populous off from such limited research is silly. All statistics are manipulated for the purpose of gaining an edge. I would love to see the independent study group that logged the raw statistics so we could at least have an honest look at the raw numbers. The problem is there likely wasn't any such group.
Actually, considering 48% of women said they bought it themselves, it represents a market for technology that's often ignored. The question of how you tap into that marked could be answered with "by making it simple enough that they *feel* they understand it well"
Who cares if they did or didn't understand it at all, much less better than their husbands. . . what's important is that they were happy with a product, and we engineers ought to learn from that.
As an aside, I wanted to know what % of these were Tivo brand DVRs. I got a DVR from Dish (since the HD-Tivo is $1k) and the software to schedule recordings or search through recorded content is atrocious. So many little things* I had loved about Tivo without even knowing it! It pains me that my Tivo stock is in the toilet, when it's so far ahead of the competition as to be ridiculous.
(*Like the ability to move from one page showing a shows detail to the next in the list without going back to the upper level menu. Or the few second skip back when stopping FF. Or the recording of suggested shows based on preferences.)
"...48 percent made the decision to purchase a DVR on their own..."
More like LET their husbands buy more home theatre equipment.
Cut out the middle man my friend.
:D) :)
Let the girls have their tivo/set top box to record shows. If you have broadband internet go to:
http://thepiratebay.org/ for your shows
snarf-it is good (google it)
tv.com will give you lists of stuff
azureus is a great bit torrent client (source forge has it, again, google azureus and yer set)
torrentreactor.net has amazing stuff (/w some p0rn!
and lastly, since this is slashdot, www.homemadeporntorents.com has some stuff that isin't AS faked as mainstream p0rn.
women filling their boxes? no problem! Get down with downloading and embrace the digital world of bit torrent.
I have a DVR (Bell/Echostar PVR-5100... crap!) It gets about 300-ish satellite channels. It also sits under my PC desk and collects dust, being fired up once or twice a week at most.
Just as there are fewer female gamers in NA because there are no games for girls, the male TV segment is plummeting because it's turning more and more into reality TV, gimmicky gameshows, and godawful sitcoms. Lessee.... "Fear Factor" or GTA:SA? "Survivor XVIII: Delaware" or surfing the net? Tough choice...
Before Oxygen and WE came along, Lifetime was catering to that precious "bored housewife who likes weepy movies" demographic (have you watched this channel.. it's one of the most depressing things I've ever seen!). Of course they will conclude that women control the DVR.
:)
A quick scan of the stuff recorded or scheduled on my DVR reveals an even match between my shows (mainly revolving around either baseball or stuff on Discovery), the stuff my wife watches (stuff on Discovery and a few shows on MTV [noticeable lack of WE/Oxygen/Lifetime), stuff my mother-in-law likes (Big Brother) and stuff my son watches (PBS kids).
It should be noted that I'm the only one who knows how to hook it up in our household...
While the previous generation got kids so finally someone would be able to program the VCR, women finally wisened up. The VCR got set allright, but to the wrong program. Now the DVR does to this generation what the anticonception pill did to the previous generation. Independence.
The next step is parthenogenesis. Human males are now entering their last century before extinction.
The men married to the women who took part in this survey are bitches.
I'm just amazed at the level of sexism I see in some of the comments. Do we need to put up a big sign out front "Remember, there are women on Slashdot too!" ????
I'd like to see a study on what percentage of Slashdot readers are sexists dickheads... and how we could get them to go away and stop giving everyone else a bad image.
- I am made of meat.
While this kind of thing could be argued back and forth until the end of time (but on this show/network...blah blah...movies...blah...tit-for-tat, etc.), it's still important to recognize that this kind of pandering is WRONG, regardless as to which side is doing it.
;-D
/.
Oh, and just as a fun jab at the 'other side':
Maybe the reason there isn't any outrage over this kind of thing (feminism) is because Men don't feel threatened at all, and expect their weak, little-women to want fluff like this just to puff up their fragile egos. Men don't need the support of their peers to feel valid, while women go around creating support groups for every little thing under the sun.
DISCLAIMER: Hey, it's just a fun poke. Don't take it seriously. There's a ripple of truth, buried under an attitude of sexism. I'm just trying to fit in here on
Machoism and Feminism are equally repugnant. I'm sick of this culture of guilt that demands that for every wrong somebody/group performs against another person/group, the tables must be entirely reversed for several *generations* just to break even. The idea of holding the sons responsible for the sins of the fathers makes my blood boil, especially since I can't stand my father, and have never gained anything (except my wonderful genetic code) from his works. There is no justification for holding people responsible who had nothing to do with the initial problem.
My family never owned slaves, or benefitted from them. They were immigrants who made their own way via work using their own hands. I owe nothing in reparation.
I have never 'oppressed' a woman, and in fact come from a family full of strong women. I owe nothing to the opposite gender, and will never take any responsibility for their "plight."
I'm a white male who has never wronged an entire race or gender, and refuse to apologize (I've already made my peace with the people I have wronged personally). So if somebody has a problem with my race or gender, they can get stuffed.
Political Correctness is a symptom of the guilt-culture we live in, and I will never have any part of it. Those that do can keep the hell out of my life.
I am serious, you really are a fucking moron. Do you known how many studies have been done to prove your point and how many have been done to counter it. Why not actually look the research up rather than typing it out verbatim.
Generally there is _nothing_ on tv for me to watch, except for the history channel, and mythbusters. Oh malcom in the middle is funny too. Everything else is for women. My wife sometimes will watch some crap on lifetime or WE, and will get mad at me when I laugh about some stupid trajedy that just occured on her show. Why do women need to cry? or watch something so depressing about a mother with a brain tumor and four sickly kids. Whose pilot husband is having an affair with three different women. I should just cancel the cable and let my wife watch them euthanize unwanted puppies at the ASPCA.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
If you're a lady and can control a DVR with some amount of skill, please post a reply to this with a short sentence showing us you know what you are talking about.
This is very important as it will facilitate great advances in pick-up line artistry:
"Hey baby... wanna come to my place and check out my TiVo?"
But seriously, I'd like to know if the article is bullshit or real.
My wife hardly every used the computer until I got a DVR, now she uses it all the time. At least now she's more willing to let me spend the money on a bigger hard drive.
women you insensitive clod!
Ed, Edd and Eddy.
...seems to now be managed by her. Even though I brought the DVR home, and probably have a better understand of everything it can do, she's jumped all over the series recording functions, as well as occasionally browsing the Guide to find stuff she thinks we'd like. I'm fine with letting her have fun with the software; we wind up with a lot of good stuff to watch. And it's all about the hardware anyway, right? :D