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DVRs Help Some TV Shows Improve Ratings
ubermiester writes "After years of panicked lawsuits by content providers against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for the content providers to learn and then immediately forget: 'Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars, and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.' The article also notes viewership increases 'in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase."
things tend to workout after all.... things always aren't so bad.... so be of good cheer
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Not only is it trivial to skip commercials for a shifted show, but it can do it automatically.
I have also adjusted my life to only watching what I have recorded. I'm not sure when the last time I turned on 'Live TV' was. I have taken to keeping the last/freshest five episodes from a number of programs I like to watch, and I select from between them. Myth automatically deletes the old ones, and I find five or so is plenty for my families needs.
That being said, even seeing a commercial these days just feels odd to me, let alone watching it.
I use my DVR for 2 reasons: to watch my program when I want and to watch without commercials. I *always* skip commercials when watching on my DVR...and I usually mute my TV if I'm watching regular programming during commercials...
I don't understand why those with PVRs still watch the ads. I've found that, with the sole exception of the ad-free (but paid-for, of course) BBC channels, the ad breaks are _way_ too long; this is mostly the reason I use a PVR. To skip through the ads.
In addition, the Treat The Audience As If They Have An Attention Span Of Less Than A Minute approach, showing you highlights of what you're going to see soon, then actually showing you it, then showing you a re-cap of what you've just seen; that just encourages more skipping from me, really.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
Recorded shows increase viewership? Like pirated movies increase movie ticket sales? Like pirated music increases digital music sales?
Question is, will the media giants really wake up and stop all this lawsuit nonsense. Will RIAA, MPAA and other copyright trolls really give up the ghost and embrace the digital age and realise the potential of the internet?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
When NBC added the “The Jay Leno Show” at 10 each weeknight, it boasted that the show would be “DVR proof,” meaning that because the humor was topical, viewers were more likely to watch it live, avoiding much of the commercial-skipping that was expected to plague recorded shows.
I think the only truly funny thing here is that NBC considers Leno to be humorous. His face looks like a banana...that is sort of funny, I guess.
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What are the odds that most people use the time during commercials to go get themselves a drink or something and aren't actually watching them? Sure with a DVR you could skip over them but it could very well be just a habit not to do so.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Back then, when TV was mostly over the air and free I watched commercials. Now that I pay for TV I won't tolerate commercials. I DVR any show I watch that has commercials and watch it at a later date when I can skim through the commercials. It is a rare commercial that I watch. I stop only for those that seem interesting, i.e. have pretty chicks featured prominently! :)
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
When I'm online I'm just not that interested in going to a website to watch movie trailers, but if one happens to be on while I'm 30s skipping, I'm a lot more inclind to watch. My web-mode is very reading centric with lots of clicking. My TV mode is very much a passive observer.
Commercials give me a break to go pee, make a phone call, or grab another brew. I still need that break when I'm watching a DVR'd show. I'm not actually watching the commercials.
"After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget"
"According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year"
"some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added"
So, the ad value drops by 54%... But up to 20% more viewers are added... Giving, at best, 55.2% of your former ad viewership.
Yes, 55.2% of your old value is SO much better than the former 100%.
Drawing the conclusion that content providers were wrong to freak out about DVRs is farcical. Their product is still worth at least 45% less to advertisers. Yes, 45% less is better than 54% less, that 20% bump from DVRs hooking more viewers is nice and all... But, seriously, it's like saying "Hey, we burned down half your home but, good news, we totally discovered a small basement you didn't know about in the charred wreckage. Aren't you grateful we torched your home?!"
Based on those numbers, (viewership up around 10% with 54% of DVR watchers skipping commercials) looks to me like the number of people watching commercials would go down. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get how this is different then what the content providers worry about. Programming viewership goes up and commercial viewership goes down. If I was a major network, I wouldn't care how many people watched my show, but how many people watched the commercials. You know, the part that actually makes money for them. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for on-demand, over the internet, time-shifted whatever. But claiming that these results fly in the face of what was expected seems a tad over blown.
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After that, they can save their money.
I have got a memory. I don't need to see it umpteen more times.
They don't know when to quit, that 's their problem.
They're cutting into my show time, that's my problem and I skip the ads because I can.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
then the vcr was supposed to kill the cinema house
now the internet is supposed to kill the cinema house
meanwhile:
http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/
lesson: people fear losing control. as if control had anything to do with making money off media in the first place
in your desperate attempt to retain control, dear media execs, you might want to notice you are wasting a lot of energy over issues that have nothing to do with your bottom line. only your fear tells you this is the case
in your business strategies, you need more zen, less mafia goons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The only reason I wind up watching commercials is because I forgot I'm watching something on the DVR and I am allowed to fast forward through it! I must be getting old..
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One of the benefits to the networks as far as ads go... our household might actually record 2 prime-time shows at once(dual tuner). Then we might potentially accidentally watch commercials on either one while we're waiting on our better half to get back from the bathroom or the kitchen. We will also go back and watch the interesting commercials... (Not the ones about medications and so forth though... those dollars aren't helping the drug companies at all... just driving up prices.)
Too bad there aren't that many real people working in the research departments for the networks... they might actually get a real idea about viewing habits... instead of approximating patterns based on computer models.
I use the 30 second skip button on my Tivo to flash through the commercials. This typically means that the only commercial I see is either the first one of the break, or the last one of the break. If the first one catches my attention in the first 3 seconds, I end up watching it, and if the last 5 seconds of the last one is intriguing (say, has a punch line but not the setup), I will rewind to watch it. Occasionally, I will end up watching a commercial in the middle if the quick flash draws my brain in too (typically with some sort of interesting colors, etc).
Otherwise, I just skip through them. Seems like there could be money made studying the unique commercial viewing habits of DVR users. I'm not sure if my own experiences are unique or common.
Also, is 'had commercial playing' the finest granularity Nielsen can provide? What percent of those people actually remembered what the ad was about? And how does that percentage compare to live TV watchers?
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
makes me want to TIVO a show about the MPAA sposored by RIAA.
They say that DVRs have increased ratings for shows as if it's surprising. Isn't this the whole point of a DVR though? You record it because you would not have otherwise been able to watch the show in its regularly scheduled time slot. So instead of just plain missing the show, you record it and watch it later. Instead of having to pick between two shows where one will get watched and the other will get missed, you record them both, and they both get watched. In the latter, the DVR has increased your potential audience. I'm a little surprised about the commerical watching though. As a MythTV user, I skip commercials altogether without the need for any user interaction. However, in cases where the commercials are not skipped (like if I start watching a show fifteen minutes into the broadcast), it's about a 60/40 split as to whether I'll bother fast forwarding. Someimes I'm really that lazy where lifting my arm to pick up the remote seems like too much effort. Other times it's the perfect bathroom break. Even though MythTV skips my commercials and could potentially pause for a break whenever I want, I tend to do it when there is a commercial simply because the flow of the show dictates a pause for commercial. It's kind of weird to pause in the middle of a conversation and come back a few minutes later. It totally messes with the flow.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Fast forward functions (I'm not sure about the new ones) enable you to see frames at certain intervals. That means you'll still most likely see this for a McDonald's commercial:
...
1. Nice juicy burger
2. Person smiling
7. McDonald's double arches logo
Sure, it's not exactly the same, but seeing a 30 second commercial in a few seconds is still seeing and recognizing a product.(depending on how hungry you are)
When watching programs like soap operas that don't require full-time attention, we'll be doing other stuff on our computers (work, WoW, newsreading, facebook, email etc) and often not bother to skip commercials if we're not even paying attention to what's playing on the TiVo. It'd be interesting to see if certain classes of shows get commercial-skipped more than others. Here, shows that require full couch-sitting attention will get commercial-skipped a lot more than shows that can be treated more as background noise.
It occurs to me to wonder if a person who is strong-willed and motivated enough to take the trouble to skip commercials on a DVR, is of the sort who weren't listening to the commercials anyway even if they did occasionally stare at the screen during commercial breaks before the era of DVR, and further, whether the sort of person who passively listens to commercials with or without a DVR is the sort of person who tends to be influenced by commercials with which to begin. Perhaps worried advertisers and network executives realistically aren't losing nearly as much of their actual, receptive (if hard to measure) audience(s) as they fear.
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then the vcr was supposed to kill the cinema house
A bit off-topic, but: In my (and my wife's) case, I usually say "Netflix and a LCD television killed the cinema house" - but in truth it was the various cinema houses that killed themselves off. Ridiculous prices for food; Overpriced admission costs, plus (adding insult to injury) 20 minutes of commercials before you get to see the movie; and having to tolerate the obnoxious behavior of some other patrons - or try to deal with it myself - because there's no such thing as an usher anymore.
#DeleteChrome
... to get up during the commercial break and got to the bathroom, get a snack, or feed the pets. My generation grew up with commercials that we couldn't skip over, so we've trained ourselves to take them as a cue for intermission. In fact, advertising has become so common an obtrusive that we've been trained to simply block them out altogether. More than half the people I know can sit through a commercial break staring at the screen and not be able to tell you what products were advertised in that break.
Basically the challenge to the ad companies is that, in the age of DVRs, you need to adjust your ads to be 1. immediately recognizable and 2. worth watching in the first place. The Apple ads are brilliant in that it's basically just two people surrounded by white. This makes the ads immediately recognizable, even when the Tivo is in full fast-forward mode. Then the ads have to be worth watching; I'll skip the debate about whether the Apple ads are worth watching, but I personally find them very funny and will actually stop or rewind to watch them.
I can see, though, that this sinks the local ad for the car dealership, or any other company that can't (or won't) come up with ads that make people sit up and take notice and make you go "wait, what?" I'd bet it's these companies and ad agencies that are doing the bulk of the complaining.
you are describing your own experience and thinking it has anything to do with everybody's experience
follow the boxofficemojo link in my previous post: income keeps going up
that's the only thing that matters
if income goes down steeply at some point, then maybe some of what you brought up will be addressed, or maybe not ever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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then the vcr was supposed to kill the cinema house
now the internet is supposed to kill the cinema house
Yes, but we all know that video killed the radio star
And I shot the sheriff but I did not shoot the deputy
When I'm watching with my wife, she sometimes uses the commercial break to have a conversation with me about any number of things. She'll actually say, "Don't fast forward, I want to talk for a few minutes." This often leads to the longer than 2.5 minutes discussion since I have to spend a lot of time apologizing for the inadvertent eye roll. But at no time am I actually watching the commercial. She makes me put it on mute. That's why I try not to watch TV with her so much.
I've been watching DVRed television and skipping through the commercials for a few years now, (EyeTV with comskip on an iMac) and one of the things I've noticed during that time is that commercials really are a part of our culture, and I'm actually missing out on that when I just let comskip leap ahead all willy-nilly. I mean, think about it... who doesn't recognize these catch phrases instantly -- regardless of whether you love or hate what they're advertising?
And if you've been watching tv for awhile, you'll probably recognize almost every one of these as well:
Now, admittedly we might be better off without some of the "culture" garnered from all those thirty-second pseudo-short-stories... and certainly we can do without watching the same commercial ten times during a single program. But for myself, I've found that I let comskip mark the commercial breaks, but I don't let it auto-skip those breaks anymore; I do that manually, as I see fit. (Such as the second one of those uninspired Windows 7 ads comes on. Ugh!)
"After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget: 'Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer.
In other words, advertisers shouldn't have worried because they're only be losing a little more than HALF their audience? And you think this DISPROVES their concerns? Ugh, slashlogic at work...
i mean, i live in midtown manhattan, for many reasons, but not least of which i refuse to submit myself to the hellish experience of commuting by car. i could write a 10 page treatise on how hellish car ownership is in my opinion
however, i do not dispute the fact that people continue to buy cars. i guess because an automobile delivers a lot of freedom in a suburban layout. and that therefore i accept that i am in the minority on the issue
so like me, you should admit that the cinema, much like the automobile, is still a great value, despite all the hassles
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually, I wouldn't mind a setting that allowed it to show a given ad once... a month, and at a normalized volume.
Heck, a lot of internet banner systems can cap their frequency so you don't get the same thing OVER and OVER again, like that fricking "Bendaroos" ad that comes on full blast every 5 minutes while my kid is watching cartoons.
But I am willing to put up with a given ad once. Some are actually quite amusing the first time around. Heck, while you're at it, give us an option to click a button and rate things. With most cable having gone digital these days it shouldn't be *too* hard to implement, and might allow users to self-moderate annoying ads and/or could even be used to provide feedback on programming too.
I've said it for years -- it's not just about skipping commercials. It's also about being able to see shows that I can't watch while they're on. More people will watch a show if they can see it at their convenience.
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i'm not saying your complaints about the cinema are invalid, i'm saying your personal experience isn't the only valid experience, expecially since box office receipts suggest your experience is not typical
the cinema is still a good value. that's not an opinion, box office receipts point to that statement as an objective fact for the majority of people. i mean, i hate cars, i don't own one. i live in midtown manhattan and i think the suburban/ strip mall/ clogged highway lifestyle is an atrocity. however, i recognize that plenty of people still think the car is a good value because of the freedom it represents to them in the suburbs: people continue to buy cars. in other words, i recognize that my opinion on automobiles, however passionate, is not typical. perhaps you should consider that your opinion on the cinema house is not typical
you admit car ownership can be a hassle, and that's it probably more of a hassle every day with raising gas prices, worse road conditions, more traffic, etc... right? well going to the cinema is a hassle to, and is probably more of a hassle everyday. and yet going to the cinema, much like car ownership, is still a value, as spoken by the masses and the wallets. i hate the car ownership experience. you hate the cinema experience. now admit, like me, that we are not the majority on our respective issues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sometimes, As another poster pointed out, I am watching shows while I am doing something else.
in fact, it is a rare occasion where I am watching something and NOT doing something else.
sometimes I catch the commercials because I am "sleeping at the controls".
I also have a harmony remote which allows me to use the skip option on my DVR without having to dink around with the remote
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As the tivo crowd gets older, we increasingly forget what the hell we were doing.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
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I have used TiVo's forever... since they first came out.
I watch nothing that isn't recorded.
Yet, when I fast forward through commercials, which is normal for me, I still SEE them. And I OFTEN will stop and watch a commercial if it appears to be interesting or for something I have interest in purchasing.
Welcome to the new higher-tech TV watcher- we don't want to watch ads for things we have no interest in. And we certainly don't need or want to see the same ad over and over and over again. If I am not in the market for a car, a car commercial is nothing but a waste of time. If I am a man, I don't want to see commercials about that "fresh feeling" down there. I certainly have no interest in debt consolidation, dresses, children's cereal, or 90% of the other stuff in commercials.
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I wonder how much TV companies factor DVD sales (a fairly new revenue stream for them) in judging the success of a given show. Given my schedule I rarely have the opportunity to sit down and watch a television series. That being said, if I see a show that might peak my interest I will tend to check it out on Hulu or some other means and if I like it, Ill buy the seasonal DVD's to watch at my leisure.
With good, intelligent series like Kings, Jericho, etc. being cancelled over mindless "successes" like American Idol, Dancing with the Stars or the 57th season of Survivor, I have to wonder if too much favorability is given to the instant gratification of a neilsen rating rather than the possibilities of success via alternative distribution methods.
HBO/Showtime seems to have largely figured this out and were among the cutting edge of delivering quality shows on a DVD format, not just mindless, pop culture schlock that seems to infest advertised TV.
Wait, the same NY Times which is having its readership obliterated by free news on the Internet (DNA registration required) and ad revenue plummeting is observing that people like TV shows more when technology allows them to not have to watch the ads which fund the shows?
Grandparent said encrypted cable. I'm pretty sure this device can't do encrypted unless it supports cablecard. Pretty much nothing can do encrypted natively unless you rent it from your cable provider. Sears has awful specs on their website.
I wasn't aware of any way to do encrypted cable until recently. Now they support Happauge HD-DVR. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_HD-PVR . Looks like $250 retail or $204 at newegg. A little spendy, but not outrageous.
But then the NYT article seems to imply while some people are skipping, those watching the ads are decently high. I mean those that watch live TV, are they really paying attention at a higher rate, instead of going to the restroom or getting a snack, than DVR skippers. And DVR may be bringing in new viewers (with some ratio being new eyeballs on the ads some fraction of the time).
I think Neilsen should contribute an optional module to MythTV that could collect TV recording and viewing data (leaving all other data on the computer alone). I'd willingly load this on my Myth if broadcasters would quit whining about lost ad viewership. Having such a data stream would be very valuable. In fact to encourage people to do it, they could pay your schedules direct yearly fee. $20 cost to them for this data seems very reasonable.
Are you manually skipping 30 seconds at a time, or are you using the auto-commercial skip flag where you press one button and it goes the whole 2:35 sec, or 2:48 sec commercial break at once?
I thought Myth wouldn't even start the commercial flag job until the show ends. However on my Myth, it takes less than an hour to flag each hour show, so it happens pretty fast.
Even if people skip the commercial, the content maker should be able to find another way to make it back...Say promote the use of a product right in the show, sponsorship, etc. just like how it's done in the Movie.
The article says "Nielsen started measuring television consumption by the so-called commercial-plus-three ratings...", in other words, measuring commercial-watching rather than program watching.
If the ratings are skewed toward passive viewing, does this explain a trend toward more brain-dead rather than intelligent shows?
That aside, and germane to the TFA -- I've stopped going to movies not because of the Internet, or piracy, or anything else . It's pretty simple -- when you consistently lower the quality of the movies, raise the prices (where are the avg ticket prices coming from in that chart? haven't seen it that low except for matinee), reduce the quantity of food while raising the price, and then to add insult to injury force me to watch fucking commercials at the beginning of every movie.... I give up. It's no longer worth my time or money. (Actual commercials -- not previews which I've never minded... but coke/nike/tbs/tnt/sprint/at&t/et al ). I'll wait for video so that I can rent it; or for cable if it's not worth that... or just not watch it if it looked really bad.
I use auto commercial skipping, there is an option on the back end that enables flagging as the program progresses.
"He is so stupid. And now back to the wall!" Moe Szyslak
TV ratings are collected in two different ways. Some people, like you, fill in diaries to report their viewing, but Nielsen also maintains panels of homes with meters attached to all the video devices in the household. These meters report viewing pretty much on a minute-by-minute (or maybe these days second-by-second) basis. There's a national meter panel, and metered panels in the largest markets as well. National networks (both broadcast and cable) and national advertisers depend on these data from metered households. The diary method is used to measure viewing in local markets during "sweeps" periods (February, May, July, November). Smaller markets don't have the revenues to justify full-time metering and use the cheaper, and obviously somewhat more inaccurate, diary method instead.
Studies conducted by advertising researchers generally find that the audio portion of a television commercial is much more important than the video portion when it comes to influencing what people remember. Another reason commercials are louder is the widespread realization among advertisers than many people leave the room during a commercial break. Not seeing the picture but still hearing the jingle can make an advertisement "effective" (in the advertising research sense of measures like "top-of-mind awareness" or "day-after-recall." Most studies I know of fail to demonstrate any direct connection between advertising and purchase behavior, but my knowledge of the field is now out-of-date. The one commonly-held belief based on experience is that cutting back on or stopping advertising for a product usually results in a decline in its market share. That fact puts advertisers in something of a "prisoner's dilemma.")