ErinMedia's Frank Foster indicated that Tivo owners and others who use video on demand do not generally skip commercials. In fact commercial viewing in fast-forwardable content was only about 10 percent less than viewing in the plain old here-it-comes content. Foster counted deliberate acts of ad avoidance (skipping, or channel changing), but didn't take into account events that might not indicate ad avoidance specifically (bathroom breaks).

First revealed at last week's AdTech conference, Foster said that the results were preliminary, and that his firm planned a larger study, to be released in the fall.

He predicted that, with smarter set-top boxes becoming the norm, firms using these data streams will take a large bite out of Nielsen's current dominance of the media metrics markets. The real-time nature of the data could even lead to ad adaptations while a program runs. The limitation to this sort of fluid feedback mechanism is no longer the information, but rather the systems and processes marketers use for assimilating feedback, reacting and producing changed messages.