The Economist calls the DVR revolution the revolution that wasn’t, because advertising-supported television hasn’t suffered as predicted:
On one point the Cassandras were correct. As prices fell and cable and satellite firms began to bundle DVRs with other services, their popularity soared. According to Nielsen, a media-research outfit, 29% of American homes now have one. The boxes are in a higher proportion of the households advertisers most care about. Jack Wakshlag of Turner Broadcasting, a cable company, calculates that DVR-owning households earn about $20,000 more than average. Yet those households do not use them nearly as much as one might expect. Families with DVRs seem to spend 15-20% of their viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5% of television is time-shifted and less than 3% of all advertisements are skipped. Mitigating that loss, people with DVRs watch more television.
Once again I’m reminded what an outlier I am, as I must spend 99 percent of my viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and I skip perhaps 90 percent of the ads. I even skip large portions of the program sometimes. (A two-hour MMA program might have a half-hour of fighting.)
I do watch much more TV now that I have a DVR though. I went from close to zero — I watched DVDs then — to, well, far from zero.
Far from being revolutionary, in some ways DVR has made television more stable. With the exception of live events it is broadly true that the most popular programmes are recorded the most. Mr Wakshlag describes it as “a hit-saving machine”. Broadcast television receives a bigger boost from DVR playback than cable television. The device has made it harder to introduce a new television programme, particularly at 10pm when people are likely to be playing back shows they recorded at 8pm or 9pm.
Again, I’m an outlier. I’ve found the DVR remarkably useful for taking in the “long tail” of programming from obscure channels at inconvenient times.