Total Control - TiVo Inc. and ReplayTV digital recording equipment information - Statistical Data Included - Polling Data

American Demographics, July 1, 2001

To be ready for the eventual mass adoption of DVRs, some researchers and advertisers are making efforts to understand and prepare for the ways the TV viewing habits of the masses are likely to change. In the spring and fall of last year, Statistical Research Inc. (SRI) commissioned researcher John Carey of Greystone Communications, a telecommunications research company, to conduct a small, 10-home sample "ethnographic" study to determine how DVRs are changing consumers' TV viewing behavior. The results, while not statistically authoritative, offer interesting and somewhat surprising insights. While Carey found that DVRs profoundly alter television viewing behavior, and indeed pose a threat to current ad models, the changes are not as sweeping as might be imagined, and in fact might open the door to new branding opportunities.

The most significant finding, perhaps, is that in all the homes Carey observed, respondents reported a better quality viewing experience. "The DVR offers people so much control over the programming, they can really find what they want and watch it at their convenience," says Carey. Because of this, DVR users stop "listening" to their televisions and become more active viewers. Carey even uncovered a rather heartwarming trend: Families tend to watch programs as a group more often, since they can record a show and schedule a time to watch it together.

DVRs make the programming and recording of live TV so user-friendly that so-called "time-shifting" of programming becomes a daily experience. This renders the mechanisms by which networks create advertising "environments" powerless, as people will now watch prime-time shows in the daytime, or vice versa, without any idea of what programming originally surrounded the show. DVR consumers actually watch more recorded than live programming, according to the study.

As for DVR's much-vaunted capacity to zap commercials, Carey discovered that with a few exceptions, people use the fast-forward mechanism to select the commercials they most wanted to watch. In other words, well-produced commercials, or more to the point, commercials that are relevant to the viewers' psychographic profile and interests, retain an audience, and probably a more receptive one at that. Ironically, DVR users are less likely to channel surf than they do when watching a standard TV. "People have been zapping commercials since the remote control," says Artie Bulgrin, vice president of media research for ESPN. "From an advertisers perspective, if people are able to control what and when they watch, the relevance of the ad will become very important." In fact, Carey found that many DVR users like the feature that allows them to download ads they find interesting.

DVR users do express dissatisfaction, however, with some of the recorder's features that have been thought to be the most promising for advertisers. Early efforts at customized advertising - in which ads are pushed directly to individual subscribers based on their demographic profile - were not well received by the participants in Carey's study. Users are also decidedly nonplussed with the "thumbs up/thumbs down" feature on TiVo, in which TiVo recommends possible viewing options. "It basically didn't work," says Carey. "It recommended shows in which the viewer had no interest."