ClickZ: DVRs Not Necessarily Ad-Killers
InsightExpress and MediaPost looked at the intersection of TV ads and digital video recorders (DVRs), and they drew a big smiley face on what has been perceived as a death mask. While commercial skipping is far and away the most used feature of the DVRs, outside of recording video, people have to actually watch the ads in order to make sure they don't skip too far ahead, racing at 60 times the normal video rate. This means they're sometimes registering the ads where they otherwise wouldn't.
Perhaps this will give the networks the idea to sell 90 2-second spots in a commercial pod, rather than the usual mind-numbing three 30's.
The study found that people using DVRs were significantly more happy with their TV viewing experience, and that this satisfaction translated into significantly more TV watching. Non-DVR viewers watched about 19 hours of television a week. DVR using viewers watched 24.
