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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
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...
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?
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.
forgive me, some will think this is "sexist" but deep down you all know its true:
You make it sound as if you're about to say something controversial when you're really just repeating conventional wisdom and pop psychologists. I do happen to find your attitude sexist, but it's an attitude that pervades our culture. Please don't portray hegemonic views as persecuted beliefs.
Men hunt, women gather.
I don't buy it. Your analogy doesn't even make sense. 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. [Of course this is an equally fatuous comparison. I make it only to demonstrate how easily expectations can be fulfilled, no matter their validity.]
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.
Since when has it ever been wrong to express such views in American society? I find it to be factually wrong and harmful to the extent that it's prescriptive, but I strongly doubt that I am in the majority here.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. -Bernard Berenson
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.
It's not a matter of disagreeing, it's a matter of falisifiable science rather than generalizating from trite, vacuous proverbs like "Men hunt, women gather." Pretty much any behavior could be described as either hunting or as gathering, and there is no way to resolve disputes as to whether an activity counts for sure as hunting or as gathering. Hence unscientific, astrology-like stuff.
We could also say that men don't use the DVR as much because they are lazy, and women do because they are compulsive. Or maybe we could say that men are poor relaters and women like the interaction-like experience of using the DVR. Or maybe women use the DVR because they have exacting, varied tastes and men don't because they are generalizers and don't really care.
And it would probably all be complete bullshit. Which is why we try to make simple, scientific hypotheses and test them in a way that could falsify them without requiring metaphor or analogy.
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.
Are you saying a PVR can replace a wife? That's just ridic-- I mean, it's...uh...
Hmmmm.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
> "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]
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.
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
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.
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