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Youngsters Skip DVR Ads Less Than Seniors
Dekortage writes "Analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers 'just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just 'background music'... I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
Yes.
I also have Adblock. I guess we are the minority here.
Also first post.
I barely watch tv and when I do the ads are the best part. ... there's bbc world news
well
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I don't have adverts on my television channels... ;-)
.. by not watching at all! This is trite, but I stopped watching TV specifically because of advertising. If I had a DVR, I would most definitely skip them, but from the few shows I've downloaded in the past I can see they're just putting the ads in the show itself now, so... Guess I'll keep not watching TV instead.
I just really hate that everything in our society has to be about selling you something, or pushing something else into your view.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I thought tvrss.net and Miro kind of made that irrelevant these days.
I don't know if anyone was confused by the abbreviation, but anyway, DVR seems to be Digital Video Recorder. Maybe it's just because I'm from sweden. Anyway, hope it helps someone.
If noone rtfa, then what's the slashdot effect?
That proves, women never grow :P
hilarious
It might also be that the older we get the more we don't change brands. If a person drinks Coke then he/she will more than likely not drink Pepsi or another brand. This is more prevalent as we age. One would then start to skip ads for Coke, Pepsi and any other cola drink, because it is not going to change your mind.
... my DVR doesn't support it. They've put in a skip but it does about five minutes, or ten, or thirty (seems to be a percentage of the total) and it's right next to the button which leaps ahead to live, deleting all the paused recording in the process.
You've just reminded me why I prefer DVDs.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Their teenage children may not feel as strongly about adverts because children of DVR buyers, unlike DVR buyers themselves, have not self-selected for wanting to skip ads.
Jusy my $0.02.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I tend to watch the ads while my wife skips them...
The difference? I don't watch much TV so many of the ads are new to me... So I don't mind watching them. I find it more frustrating hunting for the start of the show that watching them, unless they are really long or really bad and annoying.
And if the ad's interesting enough, I rewind and watch it twice
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I love the TiVo easter egg for enabling 30-second skip. I don't know how I lived without it before. I've heard of Myth and other software DVRs stripping out commercials altogether, but I enjoy the TiVo service.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
I've wondered if music, despite our need for it, is just a passive enjoyment source. What I mean is that it takes no energy at all to simply have background music play while we are actively engaged in something else. Through this, the value of music is diminished to the point of zero because in the end anything will do.
Contrast this with TV or movies which require a much more concentrated effort to enjoy. While there are certainly some TV shows which you can tune out for half an hour and not miss anything, in general watching the boobtube means imposing a restriction on your activities for that time period. Because of this, the value of TV and visual media is perceived higher than music.
With the advent of on-demand television/movies, the value of TV and movies drops considerably lower. While still higher than zero due to the inability to produce shows of any quality immediately (as would be possible with music throughhumming to yourself or singing in the shower), the value is lower due to the loss of time restriction. Whereas you would have to assign a timeslot to watch TV, now you can pick it up any time, even to the extent that video playback was just background noise.
What's more, once viewers stop paying attention to anything they aren't really interested in, advertisers are going to start clamoring for both more technical restrictions built into the device and more in-line advertising (through advertisement bars and in-show placements).
The future is going to suck for TV.
Without my DVR I wouldn't be able to watch TV!
Also, here in the UK, they seem to have started 'turning the volume up' on adverts to really grab your attention. That, the way they treat you as mindless consumers and the whole bullshit science of 'health food' and 'beauty' products make me really appreciate my DVR.
The nifty thing about DVRs is you watch when you want what you want.
So how would they know what people do other than what they say they do?
Self report is a pretty lame statistical tool.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
um...of course I skip the ads. Whats wrong with you?
Thanks to scene releases, I get no standalone ads at all. Of course I do get the in-show ads, like the pushing of iTunes, Coke, and Fords, on American Idol.
youngsters, especially teenagers, tend to be a lot lazier. Skipping Ads? they probably just can't be bothered.
Advertisers should slow their commercials down so that the play at the right speed when we're doing a 32x fast forward. Think about it - everybody wins. The TV companies sell more ad space, because a 5min break only gives 9 seconds of ad playback time. We the viewers get really concise, focussed ads. And the advertisers will actually get their ads watched the whole way through. I am a fricking genius, am I not!
Oh no... it's the future.
...every moment is too precious to be wasted on advertising.
between channel surfing and ad skipping?
Just based on personal observation, I notice most young people don't skip ads, but rather start watching another program. Their hyper short-term attention spans drive them to find new content instead of finishing the content they were originally watching. A teen will watch 10 minutes of 5 different shows in an hour, without having to use the skip button on the dvr at all.
Older people, with greater attention spans, want to continue the program they were watching, and thus use the technology to skip the ads in order to watch the entire program.
*nm
The only button on my TiVo remote with noticeable wear on it is the skip forward button.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
It's normal that DVR owners skip DVR ads since they already have the product.
Zapavision : The ads are the show
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
Hell, I skip the articles about skipping the ads.
Some ads are pretty funny. So I do get some enjoyment of watching them. But the fact remains, that I have never bought something just because I saw it on tv. So watch or don't watch, it's all the same to me.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
What cable TV I watch I do fast forward through ads. On rare occasion I see one that catches my eye (usually a movie trailer) and go back and watch it.
Software Inventor
Is there any thechnology that could be used to program tv to skip all adds? Change channel perhaps or to show the duration of the commercial and the time to the end of the ad-break
I don't watch or subscribe to cable or broadcast television.
On-demand and internet-based programming is the future and DVR will be rendered meaningless.
When I first started paying attention to TV, the commercials were between the half hour shows, or one commercial break (a word from our sponsors was the term used) halfway through an hour long show.
Then it went to commercials between the half hour shows, with one commercial halfway through at 15 minutes. An hour show would have the commercials between, and then every 20 minutes.
Then it went from two commercials between shows, and then one ever 15 minutes.
Then two every 15 minutes.
Then two every 10 minutes.
When I finally could not take anymore, and just quit watching TV altogether about 5 years ago, it was 3-4 commercials every 4-5 minutes. I tried recording a 30 minute show-pausing during the commercials, and ended up with 18 minutes of show...the other 12 minutes were commercials...over one third of the 30 minute show was commercials, not the show.
And those insidious 'infomercials'- 30 minute commercials WITH commercials...WTF?!?!?!
Enough already!
So yeah, I enjoyed being able to watch a show with only one or two SHORT commercial breaks, but I cannot enjoy the way it is now where the commercial breaks seem to be longer than the show breaks in between them.
To me it seems to have done a complete 180. It started as a way for advertisers to use a show to get a chance to show an ad or two and provide the entertainment draw to increase the audience to view those couple of ads.
Now the show is only an vehicle to drown you in commercials, the show be damned.
So now, with a DVR (with say a 200GB HDD), you're filling up over 70GB's of it with commercials, and during playback, you end up having to either hold on to the remote, or pick it up every 4 minutes to fast forward through the commercials.
No wonder most kids today have short attention spans, or just do something else and leave the TV playing in the background.
This sounds like a study done back in the early 1990's (given an $86,000 USD grant) to find out if people preferred warm or cold showers, and why. Duh!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I skip all the ads unless I'm distracted by something else. If I want to watch something on TV when it's broadcast I'll start recording it and then start watching about 10 mins in, then when the ads come I can skip over them and gradually catch up with the broadcast. I don't like ads :P
Ferret
Old folks know the value of time. Teens just love to waste time, until they realise how important it is.
make good ads that aren't annoying.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I watch little TV - mostly Futurama/Colbert Report on Comedy Central and some History/Discovery Channel. Nothing else.
When I record something, I skip the ads -- but I usually make a mental note of the advertising and the brand being advertised. Not for any particular reason or obligation, but I think it's because I'm still focused on the show rather having zoned out earlier at the start of an advertising break.
If an ad is particularly entertaining, I even back up and watch/rewatch it though:)
As a young person(21) with DVR in my room, I have to say that I don't always skip the ads.
Most often I am watching tv live, and I can only fast forward through something that has either already been aired and recorded, or is ondemand. Fortunately, the DVR will record two channels at once; either the one or two channels I specify, or the last channel I was at and the current channel I am at. This lets me watch two channels back and forth.
Sometimes I have the tv on as background, or am only somewhat paying attention to it. The second most common reason for not skipping, for me(aside from watching live), is that I simply forget that I can fast forward! I frequently wake up from some kind of mindless daze in the middle of a commercial and realize... "oh, WTF am I doing?!", then start fast forwarding. This can even happen more than once or twice in the very same program.
Because the seniors realize they haven't got much time left to watch ads? [ducking]
I don't have a DVR, unless you count BitTorrent and eMule as one .-) but they come with no ads at all.
Things are different when watching TV. Luckily I've got a TV set with Picture in Picture, so I just switch to another channel when ads start and keep an eye on the original one in the PiP window. When ads stop I switch back, unless the other show is more interesting.
the major benefit of DVRs was being able to record sans tape.
I'd guess that 1/2 the time I watch DVR'd TV, I watch through the ads simply from being so accustomed to the pacing of commercial breaks, that it's not a nuisance to watch them during my favorite shows.
The exceptions are shows like Meet the Press where the last EIGHT minutes is a huge commercial break.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
why do we make it sound like ad skipping is new, even beta max and vhs had fast forward buttons.
Blazing Spiders
....don't skip ads as much, was found to be a matter of not being old and experienced enough to know better.
I don't skip commercials... MythTV does it for me!
I don't have a DVR but I think I can explain this quite simply. I don't buy a TV to watch ads. Myself, being an old fart, just wants to watch the highlighted programs that I know I will like. I no longer want to "try" watching much unless it really grabs my interest. By flooding me with ads, the TV companies have made it almost impossible to get me interested in any new series that I might want to watch. I'm more likely to read about it in a paper/online or pick up on it via word of mouth once it's been established for about two or three series. Thus, I have a tendency to totally skip all ads for anything.
If I was a kid today, I wouldn't see the point in TV at all. It's all just ads. When I was younger, there were a handful of ads that, even back then, I used as a convenient break in my programs to use the bathroom, make a drink etc. But now there's nothing of interest to them, and if they manually skipped them all they'd never get anything done. They are actually doing what the TV companies would fear most - they are learning to completely ignore ads in all media because they are saturated with them from an early age in all media. That's a good skill for them to have, I say. Thus, they can leave them playing and it makes little difference.
Myself and my wife gave up on broadcast TV about five years ago. By that I mean that the TV is now just a display device - we watch DVD's (and even still videos) and we play games on it all the time. But that's pretty much it. We have a satellite subscription on the lowest paid rate because then we get the "old programs" channels and things like Discovery but we're even considering giving that up because it's no longer of much value to us. We watch a "new" program about once a year, if that. But if I stumble across a favourite, I'll watch it if I'm in the mood.
The chances are that we only watch maybe one or two half-hour programs a night now and only about three or four nights a week unless we are working hard. That's WAY down on our previous rates. Most of the programs we do watch are re-runs that we know we are going to enjoy (although they are being slowly ruined by being edited for broadcasting during the day and then repeated with those same edits during the evening - so we "jar" on the gaps because we know the programs well enough to know something "naughty" was cut out, even though it's way past most people's bedtime). We have the remote on hand to mute all the adverts (because of the "let's raise advert volume levels" stupidity) and wait for the channel banner until we turn it back on. In the gap, we read, make phonecalls or prepare food. A lot of the time we just switch the thing off or, if our interest was peaked by a favourite program being on but it being yet another repeat of that episode we've watched a thousand times, what we will do is dig out our "complete set" DVD and choose a better episode of the same series.
Broadcast TV is slowly dying under the weight of the ads, for which the good programming has given way - it has been for years. They are poor quality (especially the ones that seem US-based when broadcast to a UK audience - the Cillit Bang man really needs a volume-reduction operation and the "US advert with dubbed fake UK voices" is just too grating when it's every other advert), uninteresting, not well targetted, over-used, over-frequent, and too forced. And the programs that they are replacing are becoming more like adverts every day. Even the bloody movies are adverts now (the bit in "I Robot" about the trainers really annoyed me in an otherwise very enjoyable film).
I can remember a time when I was younger, when a Saturday night was a non-stop run of fantastic programs, some old, some new and some which even then were 20-year-old repeats but it didn't show that badly - that made you stay in front of the TV all evening. The example that my wife likes to use is Tony Hancock (although we're both far too young to remember it the first time around, that's our sort of humour and type of era/program
How was this an unexpected result? People have always used advert slots to get up for a drink, walk the dog, visit the loo and so on. Younger viewers simply have more distractions (friends, choirs) and more gadgets (mobiles, computers, consoles) that might need attention, or could provide the necessary distraction during the interruption.
And using television as background music isn't exactly new either.. anyone who has ever hoovered or ironed can vouch for that. The difference between young and old is quite simple here as well: younger people tend to live in smaller houses (think of a studios) where it's more likely primary tasks are nearby a television set.
Thats like stealing Television how are the channels going to make money?
Yes, lowest user ID, but I'll bet you're sad you called yourself "Pestilence".
On topic: I notice that almost every ad I see contains something dishonest or adversarial.
TV ads are a good source of information for me. They tell me what not to buy. If it's on TV, it's over-priced or unnecessary, with few exceptions. Otherwise the advertiser would not be able to pay, or be willing to pay, the huge cost of TV ads.
I'd rather suggest that it's a selection bias. Among young people, TV is a lot less common than among older people, who often use it instead of social contacts (who are either dead or old and not very mobile themselves).
Lots of young people don't even have a TV anymore. It's definitely a pattern. Far from a majority, but while in our parents generation a TV simply was part of every home, in our generation you're not looked at funny anymore when you say you don't have a TV. It's not a big deal, because it's fairly common.
So, the study group self-selects. Those who have a DVR have a TV as well. First link. Those who have a TV aren't simply "everyone", but those who more or less decided to have a TV. Second link. Why do you decide to get a TV in an age where half of the program is ads? Because you don't care much about that. Third link. If you don't care much about ads, you don't expend much energy to skip them. And that's what the study has shown. Any correlation to age probably goes more through this self-selection than through any other age-related attribute.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why would I be sad about having such a kickass user name to go with my super low user id?
...but only because I only watch channels without ads in the first place.
I think you can can have programs look for the channel logo, and if it's not showing then it is a commercial, someone with more experince in image processsing maybe can tell if it's doable. Getting TV makers to put this kind of technology inside TVs that another problem, and then most channels will leave the channel logo on under commercials too :-( .
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
Younger people do not have brains.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I deliberately start watching late; then I just rewind to the beginning of the programme, and fast-forward through the advert breaks.
Visiting people who don't have Sky Plus is really annoying!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I pre-record almost everything and skip through the ads. I hate them so much. I'm 21. I'm not sure if that makes me a "youngster" or not.
Television content is becoming irrelevant. I gave it up when I moved away from home and I don't miss it. The internet is a far more efficient resource for timely and targeted news. I can get current news on topics of interest all day long and I'm not forced to sit through ads that make my stomach churn (they can be ignored) or content I feel has no relevance to me.
I find these days that the little television I see is worse than my email inbox. Lately the ads on tv are for the same type of "products" I mark/delete as spam every day, only worse because I can't just press delete and move on.
Ultimately, any form of media that pushes content to a user rather than give them the content they want when they want it will fail.
How can that be a surprise? Young people are less experienced and therefore often less critical of what they see and hear. Advertisers already know this, which is why so many adverts are targeted for the young. This is also supported by research - one one project found that where people under ~30 would often show interest in the adverts in magazines, people over that age tended to simply skip/discard advertising material out of hand without even looking at it. The one exception was the adverts from the local supermarket(s), because they tend to list the prices on daily items. The morale of the thing is that younger people are interested in things like image, whereas more mature people go for things that have a practical value.
I use bittorrent.
I watch the ads until something comes up that I've seen several times, or is for a product I don't care about, or is particularly lame. Most commercial breaks, that's the first one, but sometimes I'll watch several commercials.
As soon as I hit that bad commercial, though, I skip the rest of the break. If I'm already hitting skip I may as well go all the way.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
When I used to program the video recorder to record TV shows while I'm busy, then watch the shows, I tend to forget that what I'm watching is recorded, and forget to skip!
I don't watch TV much anymore, and if I do, whenever an ad is on I switch to other channels then go back.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
I would think that older folks know that yes, it is only a 3 minute commercial. And to a youngster, what's three minutes. The older person has done the math:
watching 2 hours of TV a day (avaraged, could be light for some, heavy for others)
Guesstimating 10 minutes per hour of commercials
You are now up to 20 minutes per day on commercials
Or 7300 minutes per year
Or over a 30 year period of watching Ads (again, some may be hitting 60 years+ of TV, 30 just seemed to be good round number)
So, 30 years of ads means you'll have potentially wasted (perspective based) 3650 hours on ads.
Or to put it another way, you would have to work 2 years (40 hr work week - 10 holidays) to make up for that time.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Last time I read about it, they detected ads via the rate at which the scenes were switching (which wouldn't be that difficult to detect by itself, unless maybe there was a lot of movement like people walking directly in front of the camera, which could seem like a scene transition to an algorithm looking out for stuff like that, but you would then get back into view the stuff you had before and the algorithm could compare it to stuff that it's seen in the last few seconds, etc), though that method won't be infallible as scenes in TV shows could end up with a similar style to adverts. Perhaps they could train the DVRs to recognise the types of tone progressions used in "friendly but condescending market speak".
which is totally what she said
I just don't watch TV to any great extent. If I do then when the ads come on I either mute the volume, switch channels or lose interest, go off and do something else.
:) or I strip the ads myself before I watch it. And now that pressed DVDs come with "non skippable" ads (yeah right) I've mostly stopped buying them.
I am simply not going to sit there for 5 minutes listening to inane jingles advertising tampons, crap loans, household cleaning products and cars.
When I (rarely) watch a DVD then they've either been ad stripped by the uploader
If I'm interested in buying something I go to great lengths to find out about the available products before I make an informed choice as to what I want to buy.
Sorry I'm just not interested in advertising.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
I'm over 50, and I consider the entire ad industry to be a self perpetuating maggot fest. I normally ignore all ads because I know that tons of money is spent in trying to find sure fire ways to coerce me into spending money on stuff regardless of it's merit. Nuke the lawyers, but first, send them to an advertiser's convention... tee hee hee
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Yeh I bet you get all the girls at the parties.
"Hi, I'm Pestilence the ass-kicker and I have a low user id on Slashdot."
"er, Slash-what?"
"Never mind bend over so I can kick your ass
You can skip ads on DVR but not on DVDs?
Just to start with, I'm 17, and the main reason I use a PVR/DVR is not to skip the ads, but so I can watch stuff I'd otherwise miss, due to there (rarely) being 2 programs on at the same time, or me being out of the house. Sometimes when I watch the TV, it is essentially "background music", so I have something to look at whilst I'm compiling. Other times, the computer acts as background music until I find something interesting and end up missing the rest of the program. This "background music" is often something I still have on disk, and feel like vaguely watching. It's times like those when I don't skip the ads. However, on a Thursday and Friday, I catch up with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday's episodes of TNG once I get home from whatever I was doing, and will skip through the ads (I've just about got the hang of FFing at 32x, and not missing the first couple of seconds), taking 15 minutes out of the program. This is actually quite annoying though, as whe I watch them live, it takes me a couple of seconds to realise why it won't fast forward! But to further complicate it, I actually find ad breaks quite useful - they give a couple of minutes in which I can use the loo or get a drink, and I'll often wait for a break, even if I can pause it. That's my 2 pence, which probably goes to prove how erratic teenagers habits are.
It makes sense to me. Younger people have more to learn and probably want to absorb more. They are also more impressionable. Older people have seen 1,000,000 commercials for bleach... they probably don't care as much.
Speaking for myself- I skip about 95% of the ads, but that is because, again, I have seen it all or they are products for which I have absolutely no interest. BUT- I can see most everything flying by, even at high speed, and I will frequently stop and watch an ad that seemed like it was interesting or for for something in which I do have interest.
The net result, for me anyway, is that advertisers have lost nothing on me.
As an old foggy and ad-hater, although we pay around $60 a month for cable in our residence for our family's benefit, I seldom if ever watch anything at all, as I much prefer to wait and download the stuff I like later (even weeks or months later) totally commercial-free, or buy the DVD if I really like it that much.
But when thinking more about it, the part I am actually not sure that I get anymore is that we are paying almost $800 a year for the privilege to watch advertising-sponsored shows. We actually are paying to have the chance to watch ads.... Increasingly, this part doesn't make much sense to me, as it was a business model that was clearly designed for over-the-air free viewing.
All the same, in observing my family's viewing patterns, I have noticed that the younger ones tend to accept the advertising content much more naturally, almost as if it was an integral part of the programming. They also clearly identify the cutting-edge bits in ads which incorporate mind-blowing special effects, or revel in their witty humor, and to them it rates just as high as the programs themselves.
As for the real benefits of DVR's, they seem to still clearly be first and foremost their time-shifting abilities. When they get home after work or school, many people are just too passive or exhausted to bother dealing with hitting the 'Forward' button repeatedly.
In the end, just like vegans, there is a minority of people out there who are violently and religiously against any ads; but the huge majority doesn't care at all, it's just a minor inconvenience to them, and this further carries over into how they watch the DVR recordings they've made.
I would find it most interesting to know what these patterns of ad skipping become when it's automated, as with Myth TV.
As an aside, I would also love to have the option of watching HD programming in real time with no ads whatsoever. How much would this cost? Why isn't it widely offered yet?
Z.
I just use BitTorrent. I have a client that broadcatches my favorite shows from RSS feeds. They are always in matroska format 720p (half hour shows run about 500 MB, hour longs about 1 GB). I have a cron job that runs every 15 minutes detecting if a torrent has finished downloading and I am seeding. If it has, then the file is unrared, extracted from it's mkv format container, audio gets converted from AC3 -> 6 channel PCM -> 6 channel AAC, video is kept as is (H.264), then it is remuxed into mp4 format and served up to my media server (uShare). Then the file automatically shows up in my media server when I turn on the PS3 (I have a Perl script for all this). This whole process takes from 20 mins to 2 hours for the torrent download, then 10-15 minutes for the file conversion. The result is ad-free beautiful 720p shows that I can watch anytime. I thought this was the Slashdot way! Who needs a DVR? All you need are seeders... Seed plz!
My ReplayTv Model 5040 skips them automagically. Really handy. It occasionally doesn't skip them, or skips early (so you miss a minute or two of the show), but mostly works very well.
Of course, the manufacturer was sued for providing this capability and pulled it from the market. Thanks eBay!
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
Nope. See, what I do is I mute the TV and read between each segment of the show I'm watching. It's actually easy to do this since the channels usually follow a predictable pattern when it comes to the ads; there's always an ad about the channel itself before the show starts again. All I have to do is give the TV a glance every 45 sec. or so and I don't miss my show while being able to do some reading on the side.
Entirely feasible, at my old job we made overlay applications for television shows (sms voting, chat, for example) and the "bug detection" you described was exactly how to decide whether the application should be active or not, when no playlist was available.
I'm only 35 and I absolutely hate advertising on TV, painting rosey pictures about how our lives should be lived! Feck orf! As for younger viewers, ie over the age of 14 say, I can well believe the TV is on as simply a background noise, I used to do that many yonks ago.
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
I probably will take 4 or 5 30-second jumps per commercial break on stuff I've put on the MythTV. But, in truth, I'm not timeshifting 80% of the time. Remember, more than half of my TV viewing years were before VCRs were inexpensive and before DVDs were invented so everybody watched live or missed it.
You would think that, but I normally swoop in and cock-block. I'm all like, "Hey, honey. Me thegnu. I'm a tagalong. Let's do it."
And then I date-rape them.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
At least that's what I do if I'm watching live cable news on one TV. I just go to the adjacent TV and play video games on it during commercial breaks. I just listen for audio clues to tell me when to go back to watching TV. If these youngsters are anything like me, then sometimes they may just give up watching, and stick with the video games. While most commercials are just background noise, some commercials are so annoying, I just turn it off altogether.
I find myself forgetting that I'm watching a recorded show. I usually realize it half-way through a commercial break and skip the rest.
When there are ads on tv, mute the sound. Why? Because it won't pollute your ears and watching them without sound makes people in ads look like complete retards. Don't believe me? Try it. When you cut the sound you notice quite easily that people are completely acting.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
... People just think its a good way not to miss their favorite shows and are to stupid to release there is a fast foward button
Until the networks synchronized their ad timing I used to be able to watch two programs by flicking between two (or 3) channels. Having grown tired of the increased frequency of commercials near the end of a movie or drama I learned to go through the daily grid and simply mark anything I intend to watch for recording. Then I can zap through the commercials quickly. A football game only takes two hours instead of three, a movie takes 75 minutes instead of 2 hours etc. etc. I would switch to myth in a heartbeat but my signal source is satellite and no TV card can handle it. Life is good - as long as my controller and my thumbs hold out
"companies would have a lower overhead and thus could sell for less."
Unless there is perfect competition, the overhead a company has is only marginally related to the selling price.
If I can sell a widget for $100, that's what I'll ask for it, regardless of cost. If the market is buying my widgets as quickly as I can produce them, I would be stupid to reduce the price, even as efficiencies reduce costs to produce.
It's the same incorrect argument that people make that "shoplifting costs everyone more money". No, it doesn't. Shoplifting costs the store owner money, and is morally wrong. But the shop owner can't raise prices because the store next door (who has a more efficient loss prevention program) will undercut their prices.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Younger viewers are the prized age demographic in advertising circles. Why?
the theory is that the younger viewers haven't established "brand" preference for most products - and therefore can be more easily convinced to try a different/new brand older viewers probably have made their "brand" choices and won't consider changing unless something drastic happens
this is why beer commercials are geared at people too young to drink and also why the tobacco industry got into so much trouble
my guess is that "young male" viewers are simply more open to the "advertising message" and aren't as annoyed by them (i.e. younger viewers see them as "information" not "advertising") and therefore (slightly) less likely to skip them
this study confirms what marketers already knew - targeting "younger" viewers is more profitable than targeting "older" viewers (obviously there is for "most products" - I don't know what age groups the AARP targets with their adds - but it probably isn't 15 year olds or 90 year olds...)
...and if I have DVRed something with commercials I turn on the "commercial auto skip" but I also fast forwarded through commercials with by VCR way back when...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
I like to know about new products and services. I don't consider myself a brain-dead consumer monkey, so I don't really care if someone wants to spend a bunch of money promoting something to me - if I don't need or care about that product, or don't like the company, I am not going to buy it, period.
However, when a new product comes to market, it is nice to be told about it. There are many times I see an ad for something on TV and think "hey, that looks neat. Wonder if it is any good", then I do some searches online for reviews and more info, and then potentially buy it to try it. Often this product makes my life better in some way. If it wasn't for the ad, odds are much lower I would have heard about it. I know this is true because I have friends who only download TV shows now from the web and never watch TV anymore; I find they are always asking me "where did you see that?" or "where'd you hear about that?". Ads, duh.
So how often do youngsters skip seniors?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"...' I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
I just skip the TV. Problem's solved from my end...
ads? What are ads? Ever since I got the Tivo Series 1 (now have HD Tivo) I haven't watched many commercials unless they were playing during the Superbowl - oddly enough I end up watching more commercials on youTube or something else like that when my friends email links to the funny ones.
I have a DVR from ATT Uverse - works pretty well most of the time, but it does have a 30 sec skip button... Everytime an ad starts, I hit that button about 5-6 times... Then if I end up in the program, I just jump back a few sec...
The long and the short of it is that I often see some portion of the first and last ad in the sequence... Granted it's a few seconds, but I do see it. Occasionally, if it's interesting, I'll watch it ONCE.
The Mac v. PC commercials are usually funny the first time... But other than that, I skip them all... The simple reason being that there's too damn many of them, and they repeat them ad nauseum. If advertisers had a brain, they'd show LESS commercials, and they'd repeat them fewer times.
Basically if you want to advertise M&M's - make 7 or 8 different commercials. Run each commercial ONE time during an evening - and give it up after 2 weeks with that ad... Ad breaks shouldn't be more than 2 minutes, the volume shouldn't be jacked up (or "equalized" or whatever they're fucken calling it), and there should be ONE 2-minute ad break every 15 minutes... 8 minutes per hour.
Charge more for it - you'll get it too, because people would be willing to watch 2 minutes if they knew it wasn't going to be the same shit everytime and wasn't annoying...
Anyone remember those Levi's commercials from the 70's? Now those were cool... This crap now... feh...
I try and use the bathroom during the commercials because if I'm not watching TV by myself which is usually the case, it seems rude to just pause it just because _I_ have to pee. Because of this, I use the commercials as a good time to excuse myself.
What do you guys do?
When I am watching TV, I try to find 2 shows to watch. When a comercial comes on, I pause the channel I am watching and flip over to the other show. after a few flips, I get a good buffer on both channels. So I either skip them or I find myself on live tv and flip over to the other side.
If I can only find one show to watch and I am stuck on live, I tend to skip back and rewatch clips where I didn't quite hear what they said. Or if a funny comercial does come on, I will flip back and watch it. I use the rest of the comercials to burn off the buffer. (I also have a 3 year old and a 6 month old, they produce enough noise sometimes that I have to skip back alot. That or they create several events that require me to pause the show from time to time building more of a buffer)
If I am watching a DRV recording I will skip every comercial.
thats how I manage my dvr when I am watching TV. Most of the time it is on as background noise. I sit in the living room with my laptop and pick my head up for the interesting parts of the show. When I do that, I tend to just let it play.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Older folks most likely skip ads as a convenience to save time, not just to avoid advertising. The value of time to someone who works or has hobbies is much greater than a teenager who can just waste away an afternoon watching tv.
I personally skip ads because it the only way to watch an hour of tv in 40 minutes.
After reading this article I came to the realization that I am what the media companies fear the most. tech savvy,young,high IQ (seams I have big ego as-well)
Why because I know enough about the internet to stop ads , why do I block all internet ads because there's to many of them, I sick of them so I put a stop to all of them it's the advertise own fault.
I also download all my TV show even UK show, Why because I don't like been interrupted during a show for five-ten minuets, and I have the bonus of been able to watch when I want to.
But I also don't want to rip off the shows I like, so why can't they just drop the DRM. Say I go to my show website and when I get the download page some light ads, and during my show about half way through it show a 30sec ad and then goes back to my show. So what if some one uploads to a P2P the ad spreads across the internet. yes some people might remove the ads but why for 30sec?
Also itunes is just to expensive £1.99 a show WTF!!! All tho I suspect that this is on purpose to make us by Physical media instead, because they get higher margins and with the writers strike all about digital distribution, there margins are even smaller now so they are going to resist as much as possible.
As for channel skipping when at my relatives house I just go to a music channels for a bit until the ads are over.
I skip the whole show. I don't own a TV. I like my brain. I like my bicycle. I like my guitar. I like my books. I have homework, a garden, a lawn to mow.
Life's too awesome to waste it on laugh tracks.
-T
We don't skip the ads because we aren't really paying attention to the show. We're multitasking. Also, since we're not really paying attention, we don't actually watch the ads. The captive audience is dead.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
No, my whites really are whiter than they were ten years ago. The patented new formulas are better, newly better, newly improved.
My wife's legs are much smoother than they were. She is one of the 9 out of 10 women who said so (compared to using the leading brand of hedge-clippers).
And if I see another YouTube spinoff advert I'm going to puke. I saw it 10 years ago!!!
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
There are very few ads directed to those 50 and over. While the vast majority of ads are directed to the young. It only makes sense that those over 50 would skip over those irrelevant ads while young people might take the time to watch them.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I'm an old man, and I find it's too much work for me to skip commercials. I've got to push that button, then push it again. I often overshoot the show, so i have to rewind and zero in on the end of the commercial.
I'd rather fill the space with some conversation, or make a peanut butter sandwich, or work on my laptop.
I don't. I'm often wandering the net on my laptop and pay more attention to that during commercials. I also get up to pee, get food from the kitchen, pay more attention to tidying up and cleaning, etc. during commercials. I'm 32. A previous roommate did skip commercials when he watched TV, though he's not that much younger. He did pick on me for not doing the same. I just don't care I guess. A bad AV switch helped sortof, it did a poor job of passing through bright scenery signals, and things like the Macbook Air commercial went out of valid signal range to my projector and I didn't see them. :) Happened during shows and games too so I trashed that and bought a better switch, now I see all those commercials again.
Perhaps I like watching ads? Perhaps I enjoy seeing what products are out there to spend my allowance on?
I'm a 32 year old IT guy with a wife and kid. I love all things technology.
I got our DVR the minute our cable company offered it - why? Because it was available.
My wife uses it to watch Lost at her convenience - she skips the ads. My daughter uses it to watch Elmo (no ads there).
That leaves me - I never use the DVR - why? I hardly watch TV - it's background noise when I exercise or work on my laptop. There is no show I regularly watch. I see this trend happening with my kid sister in college and her friends. They don't watch TV - it is left on in the background while they do things online.
Some networks are posting their content online and forcing ads to the end viewer, but I doubt that will work. I've seen my wife watch back episodes of Lost online while she works. During commercials, she switches to her work, and switches back to watching the show after the commercial.
Ad agencies will have a hard time with this phenomenon. Expect to see more blatant product placement in shows instead of 30 second ad spots.
-ted
I have a 4000 series. IIRC, it works by detecting the fade-to-black and fade-from-black, which only happen with the real show, not the ads in between.
Max.
Personally I wouldn't mind commercials if they only played new ones every time. If I see a "Head On" commercial I just immediately switch the channel I've seen it a million times.
:-p
Maybe if they had like 30 or 60 second commercial "episodes" of new content instead of some rehashed crap like the "Viva Viagra" commercial I would probably watch more commercials.
Then again I don't watch any TV. If i do it's on www.surfthechannel.com which really isn't tv.
It's worse than that. Every time there is a small incremental change to a scene, MPEG records only the changes--very efficient. But when there is a screen wipe (every pixel changes) a new entire 'reference frame' must be added (which is much bigger than just incremental changes).
So if there are more camera changes, the resulting MPEG file is larger. So even though commercials take only one third of the TIME, they take much, much more of the FILE SIZE. It is likely your 200GB has 70GB of show and 130GB of commercials.
Movie trailers are the worst. I saw a 30 second commercial with 75 separate scenes (with 75 full wipes)! Why do kids have such sort attention spans? Could it be that they see hours and hours of this input every day, where the average scene duration is 0.4 seconds.
Forgive me if this is obvious, but the bulk of ads are targeted at kids. So it makes sense that kids will watch them.
I bought a ReplayTV in 1999 and the "skip forward 30 seconds" button wore out on two different remotes. It was by far the most often pressed button. Then we switched to cable (from DirecTV) and got a "Moxi" box with built-in DVR, and lo and behold it had a 30-second skip button.
Finally it died and Time-Warner replaced it with a Motorola box with no skip. Sad day here in the household. Unfortunately the comparably equipped (i.e. HD0 Tivo was much more expensive.
I would agree younger people let the commercials play because they are mutlitasking while there on. Probably surfing the net or texting friends in between the show. Heck I am not that young and I let commercials play wile I go online and do homework for class and I have a dvr! I get pissed when I fast forward through commercials.I realized that for an hour long show there is literally between 15 and 25 minutes of actual programming between all the junk! This has driven me to read!
Old people have less time left to live, therefore they need to skip the ads to minimize the chance of passing away before the show ends.
A lot of time the TV is just background. If I am cozy I _might_ forward through a commercial. More likely I will make a trip to the fridge, play with my dog for few minutes, check my e-mail on my laptop, or give my wife a squeeze to see if I can get sex before bedtime.
It's not hard to imagine why seniors skip through commercials. Despite not wanting to get up from their comfortable chair during the commercial there is the actual commercial content. Most TV today including commercials is mindless, offensive garbage made for an out of control generation. I've got 25 years to go before I am senior and can barely stomach it myself. If I ever get within arms reach of Flava Fla....
Well, call me crazy, but I actually ENJOY quite a number of the American networks' shows. CBS has several comedies that I enjoy, NBC has Heroes, Fox has House and 24...
Are they laden with ads? Yeah. But that's the whole foundation of the business. Broadcast TV is free BECAUSE it's ad-supported.
And now I'm going to go off on a limb and actually answer the question posed by the original post: I am a male in my 20s (surprise, surprise), and fast-forward roughly 50% of the ads in my recorded programs. If I see an ad that looks interesting or relevant to my interests (movie trailer, Mac ad, anything that looks out of the ordinary, etc.), I'll go back and watch it from beginning to end, so the advertisers are getting roughly the same mileage out of me that they would if I wasn't fast-forwarding. I won't fast-forward at all if I prefer to use the 2-3 minute break for some other purpose instead.
all the slo-mo and rewind/rewatch Victoria's Secret Ads?
About the only media I'll 'consume' containing ads is magazines, even then I'll rip out large sections (the thick pages anyway).
I have basic cable only for my 10MB internet. Subscribe to ReplayTV for exactly one show (Sunday Morning). Beautiful thing about the ReplayTV is is skips ads automatically for you. And in those rare instances when it doesn't, the 15-30 second advance works just as well.
Bottom line; I'm not interested in advertisements one bit.
Be it TV/radio (won't watch live TV, ads FAR too obnoxious and mind-numbing), internet (ad block plus), or any where else I can reasonable avoid ads... I will go out of my way to avoid.
32 years old.
I'm not even 50 yet! I probably skip about 90% of the adverts. Hopefully someday I'll make it to 100%. I've always thought that it would be cool if an advertiser would do their ad in super slow motion so that it looks normal to ad skippers.
Salut,
Jacques
On my system it seems to get the commercials in the middle of the show alright, but does a very poor job with false positives at the end. Pretty much anytime a show has a short extra scene at the end, MythTV will skip it, jumping back to the main menu, since the show is done. Then you have to reopen the show disable auto-skip, fast-forward to the end of the show to see if you missed anything or not. I find that to be a bigger hassle than having to press the skip button when a commercial comes on, so I just leave the auto-skip feature off.
Blaring annoying, clearly biased, and content-free advertisements at me just annoys me, and makes me want to avoid the vendor who is thusly advertising.
Now if the advertisers simply had an announcer type quietly and politely saying "We make beer, and some people really like it" or "We make cars like this and this" I wouldn't mind so much; but when they torque up the volume, make my TV flash like a strobe light, and then make statments like "Better tasting" (than what?!?) I just hit the skip-forward button on my MythTV remote. It makes me wish for the Good Old Days on WXRT here in Chicago when most of their ads were just a few lines read by the DJ's between songs...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Because I'm too stoned to remember I can.
My wife & I have definite watching modes... the TV is almost always on, but there are only certain shows we actually actively engage in watching, mostly because you have to or a lot of things get missed (csi, lost, house, family guy). Other shows it hardly matters if you just glance up at it from cooking, cleaning, the laptop, whatever.
The shows we actively watch, the commercials get skipped. The background ones they usually get to play.
I don't mind some commercials, as there is a good amount of pop culture buried in the commercials we all become familiar with... After all, who doesn't love the freecreditreport.com songs?
I don't have a DVR so I can't skip the ads, but even if I did I wouldn't skip all the ads. Some ads are funny (Mac v. PC and alltel wizard) and some ads are actually for things I am interested in. Plus, I use the time between show segments to do other stuff like dishes or using the bathroom.
Super low UID? That would be Malda.
Now get off my lawn, punk!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Has anyone considered that maybe the younger folks like the commercials because they actually do find them informative? Maybe there's a psychological benefit to horrible flash and glamor advertising at that age.
I'm just talking out my ass because I want to post something and have an excuse to stop washing the walls and scraping the gunk out of the part where the hardwood floor sets with the wall. I'm not sure, but I think all the mopping's actually made it worse.
I don't watch TV. I don't mean I just leave it on and ignore it or only take a peek when it's already on, I actively avoid seeing broadcast media. Sometimes there's not much escaping it like at the old folk's home, but I really do hate television so much it makes the veins in my neck bulge when I just think about it.
I do like to watch shows, though. I download House and stuff, and I'd probably buy series on DVD if they didn't cost more than a weeks worth of sustainment.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
1) By and large the ads are geared towards younger people.
2) Older people ahve seen it. They have been told what to buy and don't want to hear it any more.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If I hadn't been fast forwarding through the commercials on my VCR all these years, I'd have known about this new fangled "Digital Video Recorder" long ago!
Ads Got Babes. Sometimes more babilicious babes than the show itself. Why would a red-blooded young man skip them?
is to research shows ahead of time, setup recordings for each you want to watch, and then never watch anything unless you sit down and see that the DVR has recorded one of these shows for you. For me, the question of "what's on tv?" has completely shifted to "what has been recorded?" and sometimes "what's free on-demand?"
This is the same for all of my twenty-something friends, so I question the results of this study.
It seems so from old TV from the US anyway.
But the paper is a passive thing. You can skip it without wasting time. Ads on TV or in the program either knock you out of the "reality" or have you waiting for the end.
And in a capitalistic society, you rely on informed consumers. Marketing (i.e. lies for consumers) is not informing the customers of anything other than the product will cost money and they want your money.
Really the only shows i dont wait to netflix are Lost, Battlestar, and Heroes.
My friends and i tend to just mute commercials and have the requisite 'omg, mind is blown' discussions then, even if we're watching it dvr'd.
There's also always That Guy Who Can't Remember What Happened Last Week to contend with, and i much prefer dealing with that during commercials than missing more dialog just to confirm, yes, last week's ep involved X.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
When I was a young squirt, commercials didn't bother me much. However, by now I've had bad ads pounded into my head for many decades, and I'm sick of them!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Old people skip commercials more often because every show they watch could be their last!
Watching TV faster beats driving faster any day.
If I'm planning on buying something already I'll watch them. I find myself rewinding to catch cell phone ads now since my plan is almost up. A couple months ago when it was time to buy a car I did the same thing.
If a commercial is funny or advertises something cool I've never seen before then I'll watch it, otherwise, only if I'm thinking about buying already. Because I have a DVR I probably watch more ads that matter to me. Otherwise, I'd be in the other room or, it'd mute the volume.
I really don't mind watching the ads! Once. But I am not going to watch the same damn commercial over and over. I've seen it already.
Well even that isn't true. There are a few commercials I wouldn't mind seeing more than once, if they're funny, shocking or interesting enough.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
The amount of time allocated to advertising has greatly increased over the last 20 years, maybe older people can't stand the increase having been in on the "good 'ol days". Also advertising is getting more spastic and flashy. After watching a little drama it can be disturbing for old people to see all those lights and loud noises. I get aggravated myself when I see the same commercial over and over. It's not unusual for me to see the same commercial 4 times in a half hour, twice in the same commercial break. Saturday night I was watching SNL live in HD because my TiVo is still SD. The last half hour I remember 3+ minutes of commercials, one song, 3+ minutes of commercials, a 2 minute skit, 3+ minutes of commercials, another song, 3+ minutes of commercials, and maybe another short skit before the show was over, I don't know because I turned the TV off.
The youngsta's play the whole show with commercials because they use the breaks to do bong hits, or make out.
Besides, they grew up watching Dad hog the controller, zapping past commercials and hollerin' at everyone to hurry up from their pee breaks so he can resume the show. (Yes, we DO fast forward and then pause.) The kids don't want to be like that and are happy with simple time-shifting.
Back in the day, you actually had to get up from the couch to change the channel - which is why people would stay locked on to a particular network, not just a certain TV show. When the remote came along, it allowed us to jump from channel to channel. Now with the DVR, we can actually skip the commercials.
The reason that younger audiences, especially males, don't skip these ads is that....they're too frickin lazy to find the remote! Older people are too stubborn to ignore the commercials and will dig under the couch for 10 minutes just so they can skip 2 minutes worth of commercials. There's your explanation for these responses.
When My kids watch TV they are never at it full time they are awyas doing something else at the same time so when the ads do come on they just do more of that something else. But when older people watch TV they turn it on to wach a specific program they like and don't multi task so the ads are more annoying to them hence they are more likey to skip the ad.
My kids simply turn on the TV, they don't turn it on to watch any specifi program just "whatever is on"
I think those that skip ads are simply those who want to watch the program
Right now I'm watching Cable TV - the weather channel on my NTSC tv - Sony 32" I picked up recently on sale. I'm feeding cable to 1Ghz PC with 720Meg ram 40gig hd and AGP Radeon AIW. Can only get this sucka running win98 - I cant get any Linux distro to run this hardware combo due to fact that X server will not give me a video selection THAT WORKS WITH THE RADEON FOR S-WIDEO OUT TO THE SONY. ARGHHHH ETC. However I am currently downloading the new Fedora 9 via bit torrent. Simultaneously I have nasa tv running on realplayer. I end up watching nasa most of time, switching to cable tv for 'interesting' stuff, then usually go back to nasa, or occasionally check out download status email or go surfing. I tend to switch out of TV at start of commercial, or when some interesting event happens on nasa. The ultimate surfers paradise. My wife watches cable on XP system media centre. She usually watches PBS or TVO (Canadian PBS in Ont. Canada) or BBC. She uses the XP as a DVR if not in mood for TV watching and will play solitaire while recording. She usually watches commercials, if any (or self-o-mmercials?). Her biggest nouveau tv thrill is Free downloadable content (Grey's anatomy etc). All this on a 600K 'low' speed cable feed from Jolly Rogers. My next upgrade is to get ATSC tuners for the PC's for 'free' OTA 'digital' teevee. We are both 'seniors' (60+) and enjoy our 'entertainment'. We don't mind paying for our entertainment whether it be print or electronic. I will buy the Discovery 'Earth' DVD's (blu-ray) when and if I get a PS3. I will let my purchasing power vote by buying DRM free content. I will vote for content that is freely (as in speech) available to all. I will actively participate in the publicly(non-governmental) owned and democratically run information infrastructure that is free from private ownership, greed and control, and is free from governmental and bureaucratic control and rot. The web is an extension of our freedoms, and is definitely worth fighting for. I have lived through a generation that saw private industry co-opt the telecomm arena, both cable (teevee!!) and telco for greed profit and control. Lets fight to prevent this from happening again
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
What little TV I watch is only when there's something recorded. I can't stand the number and length of commericals combined with jacking up the volume (which I could have sworn was against broadcast regulations). Part of that is the show switching from HD (5.1) to SD (stereo) - in any case, whatever on the people that sit and watch them. You obviously have too much time on your hands.
EK
- Rewinding when I miss part of my show.
- Pausing while I'm on the phone or otherwise occupied.
- Saving a show I have already watched to watch later.
Because I tend to watch in real time I can't skip past commercials that are on even if they really suck. If something is on when I would otherwise miss the show I do skip commercials though I forget to do so often, and sometimes I see a commercial that makes me laugh and I watch it. But in this regard the DVR is no different than a VCR so why is it such a big deal now? I think most people are the same way.Yes, I do skip the commercials sonny, Methuselah
Of course I skip the ads. I will typically begin to watch a show once its half way over. That way when I skip the ads I finsih pretty much on time with the end of the show.
My daughter is 5. One time I turned on a show for her and left the room. When the commercials came on, she called me in from my office, because "the TV was broken". it wasn't until i skipped through them that she was satisfied i had "fixed" the tv.
99% of what is being advertised on tv is sh*t. Why do I want to be force fed that stuff? I suspect the younger generation hasn't realized this yet. (I'm 33)
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Sometimes a commercial break is just the right amount of time to get off the couch and grab a frosty beverage, use the toilet, etc. Maybe even enough time to have a short conversation with the family about the program we're watching. Commercials are usually placed at strategic places during the show that make them perfect for a short break. Just because I'm not skipping through the commercials doesn't mean I'm actually watching the advertisements. I can always turn down the volume a bit during the loud commercials.
I think most folks with DVRs bought them for the time-shifting feature first; ad-skipping... maybe second.
For what it's worth, my grandparents don't have DVRs and they all mute the television during commercials. And they usually don't un-mute it until at least 30 seconds after the show is back on. Television producers take note: don't have anything important to the plot happen just after a commercial break if your target age group is seniors; it just confuses them.
people still watch TV?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
I did back when I fired up the DVR regularly. I have too many games to watch shows it seems.
26/M
Not the ones in my family at least not yet.
Two factors I can think of right off, 1.) Seniors might be more conscientious of where they spend their time. 2.) Seniors are way past the advertiser's most desired demographic 18-35.
I'm a MyhtDora user (MythTV + Fedora = automated install with little work required, but plenty of hacking available if you want to). I already have automated commercial skip.
Here's what I'd like the ad buesinss to do: tag commercials in some format. If you tag commercials with what they're about, and an "episode" number, I might watch some of them. The episode number is so I can give you easy feedback and thumbs up/down stuff, and mark it that I've seen it, and unless I mark it funny, I don't really need to see it again.
What you really need to do is get people I trust to recommend products. I'm less and less in the minority now as a geek who likes computers, the internet, and high tech stuff (who doesn't these days) - give me geeks who I trust recommending products, and perhaps I'd watch.
I'm thinking folks like from the old TechTV crew. Or other folks in my social network. I don't care if my in-laws recommend some bird commercials - I'm not into birds, but if they recommend some high-tech commercials, I'll watch.
I want the tags so I can filter stuff I don't care about. I don't care about buying a car - unless you want to show me a few cool techie things. I don't want to buy any diapers - I have no babies. I don't need . How about I fill out a profile that only I have access to, and my box will download commercials that fit my profile, if you properly tag them?
I've no idea how you'd sell such a revenue model. I suppose the same as Google does, but it's a bit different with TV. I guess the shows would just get the revenue for the ads sold because they collected the eyeballs. But guess what, they'd need to mark "insert commercial here" and only the folks with OTA would see those broadcast commercials. The rest of us with DVRs get to decide what we see. You have to trust us - we may just turn off commercials altogether.
And don't get your hopes up, I'm not going to watch more than 2-3 commercials a day. But everyone has to go to the bathroom - you can run commercials while I pause for that (as the females in the household require more breaks, and us males are just polite and wait for them... or usually hit the kitchen for a snack, but we'll still be listening and may catch a bit of a commercial).
Here's the thing, you can't lock in any sort of DRM or restrictions. You have to trust that we'll do the right thing. But guess what, you'll get better product sales - and if you build it right we'll probably shop and buy things on the spot. But even if you don't, we can easily pop over to or PCs and buy stuff (why can't I buy stuff on my phone yet? That's so lame).
hello
Unfortunately the regulator OFCOM want to relax the rules on advertising. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/20/ofcom_tv_ads/
Any fellow UK people may wish to respond to the consultation here http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/rada/ We have until the 28th of this month.
That statement is so dumb, you just made the baby Jesus cry.
Remember - it's not rape if you shout surprise first ;)