“The 8 hours 13 minutes of time-shifting is only within the universe of people who do any time-shifting at all.”

I’m 99-44/100% that you’re mistaken. If you look at “Figure 10″ (it’s a table) in the April 2009 Nielsen report “How DVRs are Changing the Television Landscape,” you can see DVR habits broken out by users in the “DVR universe.” It’s adults rather than P2+, but given that it’s by individuals, I think it serves for comparison.

Factoring in the decile weightings, for November 2008, one has average DVR viewing of 603 minutes per week, or about 40:14 per month, which clearly does not jibe with the 4Q08 number of 7:11 above. Instead diluting this by a rough DVR penetration factor of 30% (by *household*) yields a much closer 12 hours per month. That builds in a large fudge factor, but as a coarse sanity check, it suggests that the 8:13 is not keyed to DVD households.

Then again, I’m not getting any younger and my brain isn’t getting any less spongy, so the pointing out of gross errors is welcome.

Just this month, I corresponded with a manufacturer of DVRs about the above idea. He had posted a question to the newsgroup misc.business.marketing.moderated and I suggested the above idea. We then privately corresponded by email. He was all for the idea but afraid of lawsuits. They being sued like how p2p networks have been sued in the past. It was this sole concern that was the reason he felt they wouldn’t do it. He says all the technology is available to do it and that it won’t be that hard to produce. Cheap actually. Easy to install. Just plug the wireless transmitter into one of your computer’s USB ports and their DVR having the receiver built into their machines. It is too bad they don’t have to will to be the first to offer this, but eventually some company will. And when they do, I think it will have a massive impact on the stats this blog post presents.

Traditional viewing is a habit formed over years and decades – breaking it wont be easy. Younger people will of course change sooner – unless they are too busy texting and sexting to watch TV.

Edit: Of course the biggest threat to broadcast TV prime-time economics is still cable network prime-time.

@ Bill: Why did you find that interesting?

“I could also say that compared to last quarter tv viewing in the home has hit a plateau. It’s all a matter of reporting bias.”

I’m not sure where “reporting bias” comes in. Four data points are better than two if one is looking for a trend.

I could also say that compared to last quarter tv viewing in the home has hit a plateau. It’s all a matter of reporting bias.

Avg. Viewer spends 8:13 watching Timeshifted TV out of a total of 153:27 watching TV in the home.

8 hr / 153 hr = ~5% of TV viewing is timeshifted.

That tallies pretty well with the fact that broadcast primetime is timeshifted on the order of about 20+%, but cable primetime is timeshifted less and non primetime is likely *far* less.

I would say 75% of the shows I watch are on DVR within 7 days of the live show, but I would count as being in the first row. I don’t think you could get an estimate of DVR viewing from this information.

Here’s the math:

79.5 million timeshifters x 493 minutes per month of timeshifted TV = 39.2 billion minutes watched via time-shifting

284.5 million total TV viewers x 9207 minutes of TV per month = 2.62 trillion total minutes of TV

39.2 billion divided by 2.62 trillion = 1.5%

Kind of amazing when you think of all that’s been said and written about DVRs and how they would radically change TV and kill the business model – and certainly they’ve been impactful in Prime. But still…1.5%. Geez.

Wait, so is the timeshifted TV only DVR playback after 7 days? Or is it all DVR playback, and those that are within 7 days are also a subset of the ‘Watching TV in the home’?