aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, July 30, 2006
It depends on what the meaning of “watch” is
This is true of me:
It seems that adults in households that have digital video recorders watch less TV than adults in the general population, according to a recent analysis by Mediamark Research, an audience-measurement firm.
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.
I wonder, do all adults actually watch less TV than we think? The most obvious difference of watching TV with a DVR is that you can always choose what you want to watch, so there’s rarely any “grazing.”
One way that plays out in my house is that I don’t have the TV turned on all day like I used to. I turn it on only when I’m actually going to watch it. So it used to be on a lot more, even though I wasn’t really watching.
LATER: PVRblog has more.
