All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Whenever you make a product and it becomes shorthand for all its competitors – like “Kleenex” or “Coke” or “Xerox” – you figure the company is making money hand over fist, right?

Well, one of the most popular media products in years, TiVo – which had the added bonus of becoming a verb as well – finds themselves in the red and is now apparently trying to patch up its relationship with the networks and advertisers it used to antagonize.

How did the 'stickin' it to the man' company change its approach?

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Back when sodas were a nickel and your grandfather had to walk uphill in the snow to school (both ways, natch), people used to watch TV at night and talk about it the next day.

Yeah. You tried doing that lately? USA Today has an interesting piece today on how TiVo is killing our national conversation:

We've gone from must-see TV to can't-talk TV.

As channel choices and technological options have expanded, fewer of us are watching the same shows at the same time on the same day. And it's increasingly affecting the national conversation...

So when we gather round the water cooler — or the Internet — to gab about what happened on, say, Grey's Anatomy last night, the dishing can dry up fast.

Even when “The Sopranos” finished in all its glory, the ratings stories were written with a curiously cautious ’12 million people watched, but who knows how many people will view it on-demand or on TiVo’ tone.

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There is a lot of chatter this morning about the news that users of Digital Video Recorders like TiVo still watch TV ads. The assumption has always been that DVR users fast forward through advertisements, but Nielsen Company data suggests that, on average, viewers actually watch two-thirds of the ads. Why? There is a lot of chatter this morning about the news that users of Digital Video Recorders like TiVo still watch TV ads. The assumption has always been that DVR users fast forward through advertisements, but Nielsen Company data suggests that, on average, viewers actually watch two-thirds of the ads. Why? “One big reason is that many people with DVRs still tune in to watch about half of their shows at the scheduled start time, meaning they must sit through commercials,” according to the New York Times.

This news has serious implications for broadcasters, who have long feared a DVR-enabled populace that skips commercials. (Those fears are part of the reason that advertising has increasingly been integrated into the programming itself – those Coke glasses don’t show up on “American Idol” by accident.) The new data means that broadcasters could start charging advertisers for commercials viewed by DVR-users, something they have not been able to do thus far. It might also keep broadcasters from abandoning the traditional advertising model, an outcome some have said was inevitable once DVRs reached critical mass.

There are reasons to be skeptical about this study, however. The first is simple common sense: Why would people with the option of skipping commercials not bother to do so? I understand that many people tune into shows at the time they air, but that seems like learned behavior that will fade as DVR use grows. In addition, the Neilson Company is not exactly an unbiased player in all this, since their revenue is tied to their ability to measure television audiences. If broadcasters fundamentally alter their business model because ads are going unwatched, the company could be left out in the cold.

If you, like me, watch many of your programs via a TiVo or other Digital Video Recorder (DVR) device, you've been continually stymied in your efforts to catch "60 Minutes." Yesterday, for example, coverage of the Masters golf tournament went until about 7:45 here in New York, which meant that I only got to watch about a quarter of the program before it cut off. "60 Minutes," in fact, might be the most TiVo unfriendly program on the network schedule, because it often follows live sporting events, which don't have set end times. During football season, for example, it's a virtual guarantee that the show won't start at its scheduled time, which means TiVo users are often out of luck.

TiVo is not yet a widespread phenomenon – the company had about 4.4 million subscriptions as of January 31, 2006 – but the use of TiVo and other DVRs is growing. (TiVo's subscriber base grew 45% during the past year.) The boxes record shows based on the schedule provided by the networks, not what's actually on television, which means your TiVo has no idea it's giving you the end of an event like a press conference or sporting event instead of what you want.

One solution for the networks, if they want to provide one, could be to schedule extra time to compensate for an event that might run long. The problem with that is that it risks leaving the network with the potential for a bunch of dead time between the end of the event and the start of the next show. Most viewers who've been watching a sporting event, for example, only have so much patience for analysis, interviews and highlights before they see what else is on and the network loses a sizable portion of its audience. Another possible solution is for the networks to enforce time constraints whenever possible. That's what happened when President Bush gave an April 2005 press conference in prime time that the networks reluctantly agreed to air. Shortly before 9:00 pm, Bush said, "I don't want to cut into any of those TV shows that are getting ready to air, for the sake of the economy." He was too late, by the way: NBC and CBS had already cut away from the press conference.

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