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.

Comments

I'm missing something.

[bsdrawkcab]

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.

Re:Skewed?

[neverkevin]

I agree this is probably a flawed/biased study, however the sample size is not the issue. 1000 people is common for a national wide poll. See http://www.gallup.com/help/FAQs/poll1.asp :

To be sure, there is some gain in sampling accuracy that comes from increasing sample sizes. Common sense -- and sampling theory -- tell us that a sample of 1,000 people probably is going to be more accurate than a sample of 20. Surprisingly, however, once the survey sample gets to a size of 500, 600, 700 or more, there are fewer and fewer accuracy gains that come from increasing the sample size. Gallup and other major organizations use sample sizes of between 1,000 and 1,500 because they provide a solid balance of accuracy against the increased economic cost of larger and larger samples. If Gallup were to -- quite expensively -- use a sample of 4,000 randomly selected adults each time it did its poll, the increase in accuracy over and beyond a well-done sample of 1,000 would be minimal, and generally speaking, would not justify the increase in cost.

TV Advertising

[jcnnghm]

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.

Re:this is obvious, isn't it?

[maxpublic]

Men hunt, women gather.

Regardless of the sexism, it's just plain false. For most of human history humans got 90% of their calories from gathering and only 10% from hunting. On the whole, humans were lousy hunters. The whole "human-as-mighty-hunter" thing was a myth disproven decades ago, but it still manages to perpetuate itself in popular culture.

I guess guys just like to think that they're 'naturally' brave warrior types genetically suited to running down large mammals and eating them raw. In fact, most of the time the only thing a man 'ran down' was a carrot or apple.

Max

Re:Ad execs: read up! Blipverts!

[AvitarX]

Don't exagerate. A little under a third of programming is commercials.

or a little over a quarter.