The New York Times has an interesting piece today on the differences between what types of shows people watch live and what type they watch on their DVR’s:
On April 4, the ABC series ?Lost? had 10.8 million viewers ? less than half the audience that ?American Idol? attracted an hour earlier on Fox. But among people using digital video recorders to defer watching TV, ?Lost? was almost twice as popular as ?American Idol.? Why?
Shows with content that can be quickly eclipsed by the news, broadly speaking, do not do well in DVR playback. Sports and news, for example, have almost no deferred viewing. That goes for contest shows, too.
?People know the next day that Sanjaya?s been voted out,? said Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, an ad-buying agency. ?So there?s an immediacy to watching it live, or as close to live as you can.?
By contrast, dramatic series like ?Lost,? in which each episode fits into an unfolding narrative, have far more DVR viewers.
Shows geared for younger audiences are also more likely to draw in DVR users. According to figures released by Nielsen last week, DVR viewership of ?The Office? equaled 31 percent of the show?s live viewership in the first week of April, while ?Desperate Housewives? picked up only 10.8 percent more viewers.
The ?Housewives? viewer is, on average, eight years older than the typical viewer of ?The Office.?
This isn’t surprising. Like most people, they only time I’ve used the DVR while watching sports, for example, is if there’s a play I want to watch over again — call it my own personal instant replay. Outside of that, I can think of almost no could reason to TiVo the news, or anything like American Idol that runs live and is all over the news the next day.
