Contributing to global climate change since 1965, Allen believes that you have a Constitutional right to his opinion. 
Watching more TV
There’s an interesting if not also short article at the NYT (free subscription required) about a study suggesting owners of DVR (or PVRs or TiVo) watch more television than do people who still watch “live” television.
That finding, which comes from in-home interviews conducted by Mediamark with 26,000 adults between March 2005 and May 2006, seems to conflict with the contentions of the major broadcast networks. Researchers for the networks told advertisers in November that people in households with a DVR watched 12 percent more hours of TV a day than those without. Those researchers had argued that that tendency counterbalanced the possibility that DVR users would skip past ads.
Yes, DVR users often skip ads. When all I had was one of those old VCR thingies, I rolled past the ads with abandon, so not much has changed. I suspect if a person watches a television program from a recording then it is more likely the person will “skip” the ads. They do it 1) because they can and 2) because they taped the program with the intent of watching the program. The only time I’m aware of people watching TV for the ads is during the superbowl.
That being said, my newest PVR box doesn’t automatically skip over the ads the way my older ReplayTV 4500′s do. Instead, it gives me a graphical “hint” in the timeline bar about where the ads are so I can more easily hit the 30 second skip button the right number of times, but I find that seeing just a glimpse of an advert sometimes causes me to stop, back up and watch the whole thing. 60 second “blue pill” ads are easy to skip; that cute gecko from the insurance company from which I will never buy insurance is irresistible.
Note to advertisers: make more entertaining ads and we’ll watch them… at least once.
As for watching more television, I think the study is correct. Lately I’ve been watching programs broadcast in HDTV. In the first week I watched just about anything in High Def just because it was so darned pretty. As time goes on the novelty will wear off and I’ll use the PVR like any other appliance; I’ll go back to watching programs because I want to see them, not just because they’re rich in visual detail.
And I’ll skip the ads.
I’d agree that I (we) watch more teevee since being able to skip ads. Less aggravating. I also get really annoyed that the volume of the ads is much louder. So I go out of my way to ignore them.
Which brings me to a question about your setup: how well does it work for simply pausing ‘live’ tv and then watching it? I ask because we often see something at the last minute we’d like to watch. We just tune it in, hit pause, and do something else for a few mintes and we can watch a show close to its actual airing time. This works especially well for shows your co-workers will ruin for you the next day as well as still being able to call in at the end of American Idol.
July 31st, 2006 at 12:11 pmJeff,
It works perfectly that way. We’ve done the same thing for years with the ReplayTVs — pause live TV for the first 15 minutes of a program and then watch it through to the end and pretty much catching up with live content in the last act.
One thing I have noticed about live TV with this kit is that, unless the signal is rock solid, there will be little glitches in the audio and an occasional dropped frame. Backing up seven seconds makes this go away. I suspect this is a result of the playback having a chance to “look ahead” to make up for bad or missing data. Since stream is stored on disk just the way it is captured, that’s my best guess.
I’m going to do a post on performance soon but I can tell you anecdotally that the processor doesn’t work very hard under any condition — even with playback of a recorded show combined with capture of another one. Same thing for storage. I’m not bumping into a bandwidth limitation.
July 31st, 2006 at 12:27 pmhmmm, i dont watch tv… so this was interesting. Since my frined moved down like almost two weeks ago, I have been watching tv with her and I think some commericals are funny, like the “Hooray beer” commercials. in fact, its going on my blog, who ah!
August 1st, 2006 at 11:58 am