Ad-Skipping is Commonplace using Digital Video Recorder, finds Survey

Lyra research into using digital video recorders (DVR) "DVR Love: A Survey of Digital Video Recorder Users" reveals ad-skipping to be a key pleasure in use.

Lyra asked respondents two questions specifically about using DVRs to skip past commercials. The first question was directed towards "programs watched while they were broadcast" and asked what percentage of those programmes the respondent began to watch after the start of the programme for the specific purpose of using the DVR to fast-forward past the commercials or other ads. The survey notes that delayed-start behaviour is common among DVR users and possibly serves two distinct purposes that are simultaneously accomplished with the same push of a fast-forward button on the DVR remote control: to save time (up to 20 minutes for a one-hour programme - this is a US survey) and to avoid being subjected to ad content.

The results show that 17% of respondents said they never started watching programmes late to skip ads, and 10% said that every time they started watching a program late, they did so for the purpose of skipping the ads.

The overall mean finding was that respondents said they started watching late to skip ads for 43% of the programmes they watched during the broadcast. These findings do not necessarily imply that the respondents actually skipped over every ad when they started watching late, says the survey. 'However, wording of our question clearly implies premeditation — that is, not only did the respondents intend to skip ads before they even began watching the programs, the desire to skip ads impacted when they began watching. This has important implications for the TV advertising industry beyond the "death-of-the-30-second-commercial" issue typically raised in discussions of DVR users' ad-skipping behavior.

The second question asked respondents to estimate the percentage of commercials or other ads they skipped when watching those programmes. The average respondent said he or she skipped more than three-quarters of the ads when watching time-shifted programmes. Half the respondents said they skipped 95% or more of the ads.

Results also show that the longer users have had a DVR, the more ads they skipped. If further study confirms that time shifting increases with length of DVR usage, then ad skipping will not only increase as household penetration of DVRs grows but also as users gain more experience with their DVRs, which will further accelerate the aggregate amount of ad skipping.

So far, the survey records, the reported amount of time that respondents said they spent watching time-shifted programs increased in proportion to the length of time the respondents said they had used a DVR. One possible explanation given is that the more experience users had with a DVR, the more accustomed they became to watching programs after they had been broadcast. Another possible interpretation could be that the people most interested in time shifting programmes were the earliest purchasers of DVRs.

Interestingly, women said they watched less time-shifted TV than did men. The gender difference is statistically significant and could possibly indicate that women are less comfortable programming a DVR for time shifting, or perhaps that women are less interested in planning their TV viewing ahead of time.

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