DVR viewers still watch two-thirds of ads
Cory Bergman February 15th, 2007
Nielsen has released intriguing new data into the viewing habits of DVR households. Viewers watch about two-thirds of the ads in large part because they still watch half of their programming live — mostly news and sports. Viewers who watch time-shifted programming watch 40 percent of the ads. During the first 27 hours after being recorded, primetime broadcast commercials gain 16 percent in ratings. After 7 days, it’s 22 percent. “People are actually playing back more of the commercials than we thought,” said Steve Sternberg, EVP at Magna Global Media Research, an ad-buying agency. “People are buying DVRs not because they want to time-shift all of their viewing and skip all commercials, but because they want to time-shift some of their viewing.”
Adds J in comments: “People who don’t fast forward commercials are probably the same people that had vcr’s set to flash 12:00…. The data seems counterintuitive but I think people don’t realize you can just start watching programs 10-20 minutes after they start and catch up by the end of the show.”
9 Comments Add your own
1. J$ | February 15th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
People who don’t fast forward commercials are probably the same people that had vcr’s set to flash 12:00.
Sports are the ideal situation for dvr’s- 3 hour programs with many commercial breaks- you can skip commercials and save yourself an hour- that’s a pretty significant amount of time.
The data seems counterintuitive but I think people don’t realize you can just start watching programs 10-20 minutes after they start and catch up by the end of the show.
2. Brad | February 15th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
This is the same compnay that hasn’t even started measuring viewership in bars or dorms yet.
Besides, they would never be biased in their study.
3. Echy | February 16th, 2007 at 5:43 am
Of course they are going to say people don’t skip the commercials. If they did then Nielson would put themselves out of business.
4. jennnnnnnnnn | February 16th, 2007 at 7:38 am
i do like J$ and wait like 12 minutes to start watching an hour long show and i usually catch up by the end.
i was actually looking for some data on the ACTUAL lengths of shows.
nothing is more frustrating than waiting too long though and having the damn thing cut back to live programming with like 1 minute left! argh!
does anyone know network standards on this???
5. Bob | February 16th, 2007 at 8:02 am
On average, an hour long network show has between 42 and 43 minutes of Actual Show, the rest is commercials (both network and local). A half hour show averages between 19 and 22 minutes.
6. Lyle | February 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
J$, based on a few friends’ behavior I think a few of the “live” watchers do understand they could start late and skip all the ads but don’t want to do that with live programming the find important like sports. In those cases, the DVR’s main function is the “pause live TV” feature which gets the next commercial break FF’ed through… but watching a game an hour after it started would be unthinkable because then their friends would be ahead of them in knowing how the game is going.
Though there’s probably a good amount of not understanding the tech, as well. Still with sports I know a few people who’d rather deal with ads than being behind on the game.
7. Echy | February 16th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
The main reason most people watch it live may be their system only allows the recording of one show at a time. So they just watch it live. Dual tuners for recording changes the experience dramatically.
8. George Creedle | February 17th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Sometimes I want the illusion of watching a Tivo’d show live and fast forwarding thru commercial pods blows that, plus sometimes I just plain forget that I have that choice.
As far as commercial break formats, most syndicated shows have three 2:00 breaks and a :74 or :94 break per half hour. Network primetime has less, but formatting is more uneven, with fewer and shorter breaks at the beginning aand they tend to bunch up near the end of show.
9. TRIPAYADVANCE | March 17th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
They hate losing, so they know that losing will only inspire them to become better
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed