Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Hell, I skip the articles about skipping the ads.
TiVo did a pretty impressive foot-in-mouth when, shortly after the Janet Jackson boob incident, they said it was the most rewound moment ever.
Ever notice how they're always rather insistent that you plug the dvr into a phone or ethernet? Dish charges $5/mo per dvr that isn't plugged in.
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
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.
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
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.
You download TV, and then decide to watch American Idol?
Do feel free to jump in front of the nearest bus. You'll be doing the genepool a favour. Maybe if we get enough people removing themselves, "I should be famous because my mummy loves me" TV will slowly die out.
MythTV automatically marks and skips all commercials , with fairly high accuracy. It's a rare event that I have to manually do anything. Most commercials are just gone.
http://www.mythtv.org/
The trouble with claiming to have the lowest user ID in a thread is that someone with one lower will inevitably show up just to post and annoy you. N00b.
Now, as for the topic at hand, MythTV does allow automated commercial skipping, but you have to remember that most DVRs consumers use do not support anything more than a glorified fast-forward like a VCR. My Scientific Atlanta PVR from the cable company is like that and doesn't even offer skip feature. I believe TiVos are the same way unless you use the code to unlock the 30-second skip feature.
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
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!
It sort of skips ads. Not intelligently. I have it, and the button on the remote can be set to one of several distinct time frames, and that's about it. It's a 'dumb' feature in that it doesn't try to figure out how long the ad is or anything, it just moves forward a set amount of time. I can't remember off the top of my head what the options are, but generally you can get through ads in about two or three clicks. It's a bit annoying, but not "I'm going to kill the programmer" annoying.
No the "I'm going to kill the programmer after I hunt him down and torture him for three weeks" 'feature' that FiOS has is the general buginess of the on-demand stuff. You push the button and about 1 out of 3 times it will simply get confused and refuse to give you access to anything for about 2 minutes. If you are scheduled to record ANYTHING during that time, you are screwed because it will not start recording, and it will not let you fix that fact either (grrr).
Another annoyance where I'd love to hunt someone down is the recently discovered 'feature' that means if you are going to watch something on DVR, but have 2 shows scheduled to record, you can't have it paused at the moment they are scheduled to start recording, or it will malfunction and fail to record, but if you try to fix this like 2 seconds after the fact because you've realized what's happening, you can't because the machine thinks its already recording (but isn't) and it will only give you the option to cancel the recording (which doesn't work). Argh!
That said, overall, if you learn to avoid the one bug, and that starting to watch something On Demand just before a taping is scheduled to start is probably a bad idea, then you'll be okay. Annoying (as in, let me shoot someone so their replacement will have motivation to fix it), but not a deal breaker, because overall they have an excellent selection of channels for the price, and their internet service is quite good and very reliable (at least it has been for me so far), which is something I really appreciate. I've never hit bandwidth caps or shaping or anything, and I'd know--I use torrents and isos quite frequently, so there.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
"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
My ReplayTV 4000 skips adds automagically and still works after all these years (so I'm told - I let my old room-mates use it since I'm out of the country and last time I visited it was working just fine).
...
It isn't 100% reliable though, so I noticed that they will often skip back 5 seconds to see if it skipped forward too far
Max.
Disclosure: I am 50, I don't watch more than a few hours per week. I'll watch *entertaining* television ads. However, they stop being entertaining after the fifth or sixth viewing. When I see the *same* commercial 5 or 6 times in a two hour block, the advertzoids have lost my willingness to view their ad. Non-entertaining ads lose immediately. Shouting at me loses immediately. Gross repetition of the same ad loses immediately. Ads I'm really willing to watch are the ones that evolve or tell a story over a few chained commercials. I don't care if it costs them more - if they want me to watch it, they have to work harder. Frankly, I'd like to see fewer commercials per hour, or bundled at the hour marks -- and I'd be willing to tolerate product placement within a series like they used to do in the 1950s and 60s. Believe it or not that was less intrusive and actually more enticing to buy the product because you saw it used in context. (mmmmmm, Blammo's Evaporated Milk made these cookies scrumptious, don't you think, George?)
The trouble with claiming to have the lowest user ID in a thread is that someone with one lower will inevitably show up just to post and annoy you.
I hate people like that.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.