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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
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 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.
wow this was especially sexist. the disturbing part is that it was modded interesting.
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
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.
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
I bought my parents a TiVo with built-in DVD burner last Christmas (it's their favorite present ever, btw). My Mom is fairly technophobic, but picked up on how to program the thing right away. I wouldn't say she controls it necessarily, but let's just say I'm guessing she's pretty adament about certain show's being high up on the ole priority list.
Remember that old matra that was oft-spoke years ago: "someday the technology will be so advanced, it will be easy to use, and people will view their computers just like any other appliance"?
Guess what? It's here, and it's called TiVo! For the relative complexity of what it does, I'd have to say that TiVo has one of the most brilliantly-designed user interfaces I've ever seen.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Women especially with technology if they use it enough to get by will claim they're experts
Whoa, reel in the sexism there spanky. I work in a office that has some of the smartest women I've ever met. Level 3 hardcore technowizbang smart women.
Maybe you should work for a company that doesn't look for pants when they're hiring smart people. And dresses for receptionists?
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.
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.
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
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.
Now, what features do their husbands have that these women DON'T understand how to interface with?
John
Men can't think straight when they have hard-ons
Are you trying to say that man are sexually excited by DVRs? You hang out with some weird men.
> "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
Yay, fun gender-bashing time! Men are controlled entirely by sexual urges! Women are emotionally unbalanced and can't think logically! Men are violent, dangerous brutes! Women are weak, timid sheep! Men never ask for directions! Women can't drive!
Don't miss next week's episode of Idiotic Generalizations: Liberals vs. Conservatives!
[insert witty quote here]
LOL. Ask you average man how to extract the video data off the hard drive...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Spongebob controls the DVR, of course!
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.
Interesting that it's only sexism when something is said about women. But when women start talking about how much smarter they are than men ... that's headline news.
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
"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.
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
"You hang out with some weird men."
Or some sexy DVRs
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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
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.
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
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
So... it's ok for you to make an assumption about him, and where he works based on a simple comment, but it's not ok for him to say anything based on his experiences?
How is that world you're living in, anyways?
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Currently it's about 15-19 minutes per hour.
It's easier to think of it in terms of fractions, a little over a third of all TV programming is commercials.
30 minute shows usually end up being 20-22 minutes long, 1 hour shows usually end up being 40-44 minutes long.
I only watch "real" TV for one show a week at a time, maximum, now. BitTorrent rules (don't even have to remember to hit record, I can get shows as far back as the 1970s!).
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
Don't exagerate. A little under a third of programming is commercials.
or a little over a quarter.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
55 percent claimed they understood the system more than their husband.
And I'm sure we can take them at their word.
It's brilliant how poetic that statement is. You've illustrated the problem perfectly. Men must accept, revere, and worship women. But if women do anything offensive and we complain, we're just too weak.
The 'revenge feminism' angle is being played way too often. You can see it anywhere on TV if you have your eyes open. Men are consistently infantilized in entertainment and advertising. Since advertisements generally have less air time, they tend to be more egregious about it.
For example, in Canada there is a commercial about stopping the spread of HIV. On this commercial a talk-show host - female - is paneling three 'guy' penis-shaped objects. The woman asks if they ever 'try for sex' on the first date, and the guys all hum and haw about how women aren't objects, they respect their spirituality ... and the woman instantly sneers at them and screams at the audience 'don't trust your date'. The audience, full of women, cheers raucously at this. End message: men are sex-obsessed pigs, and only women care about the spread of STDs.
For me, true disgust with this odious gender bigotry pinnacled when I saw an episode of "Third Watch" (ok, it was a slow TV day) where a female detective rammed her gun into a guy's crotch and threatened to shoot off his toolkit. While this was happening heroic music was playing - see, the female cop was avenging the death of her sister, who OD'd on drugs bought from the male pusher. Hooray for justice!
The odd thing is that this swing of attention - which is outright pandering to the female demographic - has actually infiltrated even the steadfastly male-dominated cultures. Yesterday I was watching 'Appleseed', an anime movie. The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which mankind has formed a symbiosis with engineered beings. Every positive character in the movie is female. The Prime Minister is female. The doctor who invented the 'clones' is female. The hero is female. The men in the story are either war-obsessed genocidal maniacs or just there to spout anti-woman dialogue to justify the revenge feminist angle. And this is Japanese anime!
Frankly as much as I find it offensive I also find it pathetic. There's a desperate neediness about the whole thing, which I don't believe truly 'equal' people would require in order to feel good about themselves. But to be fair, we've been suffering the 'white guys are lame, white guys can't dance, white guys can't jump, white guys can't play basketball' crap for years too. Hopefully it's all just a phase.
And, hopefully, someday I'll be able to sit down to dinner without being assaulted by countless vignettes in which men are the goofy idiots and women the wise sages - or, at least, fewer commercials about feminine itch, odor, and leakage.
Ed, Edd and Eddy.