Guess what? Apparently DVRs aren’t the commercial killers everyone was afraid they’d be. Even though DVRs let you skip past ads, it turns out that lots of DVR users are too lazy to bother:
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. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?
The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.
“It’s still a passive activity,” he said.
Hard to believe. Maybe lots of people actually like commercials? I can’t tolerate them, myself. Whenever a commercial break comes on, I start manically flipping through the channels looking for something else. Maybe a few minutes of a ballgame. A little bit of CNN. Anything. Having to sit through commercials is like having to eat breakfast without something to read in front of me: completely intolerable.
Which really means I should get a DVR and join the 54% of viewers who do skip ads. Instead I watch shows at their regularly scheduled times and then immediately start channel surfing whenever commercials come on. Sometimes I get back before the show starts back up, sometimes I don’t. Pretty dumb, I suppose.