Not surprisingly "extreme techies" are different than the general population. Bill and I are both fairly early adopters, we had our first DVRs in the 1990s (I was a TiVo guy, Bill was a ReplayTV) but our extreme techie days are probably behind us. Still, we do not project our own usage out to the general population, but there are a lot of early adopter techies on the Internet (and quite a few who read this site) who sometimes do.
A new study highlights some of the habits of "extreme techies" and "TV devoted online socializers", THR has the scoop:
So just who are those so-called early adopters?
A new Nielsen study focused on broadband-media consumers reveals that these folks are hardly a homogeneous group of gizmo geeks. Because who they are and how they get involved with broadband media can help advertisers and producers figure out how best to market their products, Nielsen did a deep dive into data and came up with eight distinct categories of such consumers.
Far ahead of the tech-adoption curve is what the study terms "extreme techies": tech innovators at the forefront of adoption behavior.
Dear Lord, I feel like a relic. I STILL record programs on VHS tape! But at least I have Internet and watch programs that way!! (i.e., CHUCK!!!)
I TOTALLY understand what it’s like to be an early adopter! I was one of the first people to ever be hooked on the awesomeness that is Joss Whedon, and it began that fateful day in September of 1989 when I watched the first episode of Roseanne that Joss wrote! It was the episode where Jackie decided to become a cop! It was just SO funny that I knew at once that Joss Whedon was the best writer who ever was! Plus, just like that study said, I’m chiefly male! I’m still looking into actually adopting Joss, but I’m not sure you could call that early adoption…!
I wouldn’t class myself as an “extreme techie”, but when I get my dander up…
Today I discovered someone had recorded a video of Sharon Corr, of my favorite rock group, the Irish family group The Corrs, who had done an interview with Dave Fanning, a well known Irish VJ, on RTE2 in Ireland. She’s got a solo album coming out this summer and I wanted to see if she had any comments on it. Plus she’s incredibly gorgeous…
Unfortunately, the person who recorded the video did so in RealPlayer IVR format. This format is pure crap. It’s totally proprietary to RealPlayer, nothing except RealPlayer will play it, and it can’t even be converted by anything. Totally useless garbage, which we have come to expect from the morons at Real. Most computer media types HATE Real with a passion.
So I go looking for some way, any way, to convert this thing so I can play it. First I installed RealPlayer 11, Linux version, on my newer box. Damn thing wouldn’t play ANYTHING, let alone IVR. Total garbage. So then I installed the Windows version on my older box that dual boots Linux and Windows XP. That played the file.
Now to convert. I have to use RealPlayer 11′s CD burning capability to burn a video CD. Now I have to rip that, and then convert it into something my Linux media players will handle (and they handle pretty much everything OTHER than IVR garbage). I install a converter program on Windows, which now tells me it will take an hour and a half to convert this 20 minute video to HD 720p MPEG4…Wonderful…So now I wait…
And the conversion program is going to watermark the output file (because it’s the trial version, full version is $50 or whatever)! So that means I’ll have to try ripping the VCD over on the Linux side and converting it there.
This is what we techies go throw every day – trying to get anything to work.
As Woody Allen once said, summing up the human condition in five words: “Nothing works and nobody cares.”
What amazes me about the “TV-devoted” category above is the 47 hours a week of TV. That’s about seven hours of viewing a day! These people must skew retired.
You know why the extreme techies only stream 91 minutes a week? Because they couldn’t figure out how to download the file from a certain site. LOL! Otherwise they would have downloaded it and not streamed at all. And the 3 hours of video they watch a day is probably news or sports, programs they don’t need to download.
I was positive BETA VCR was the way to go.
47 hours a week? i thought i watched a lot of tv
I wonder how much time these extreme and devoted groups spend on-line on top of their TV-watching and video-streaming.
Rick Holy says:
“Dear Lord, I feel like a relic. I STILL record programs on VHS tape!”
Man, I have daisy-chained VCRs so that I can lay down the AM radio audio against the OTA video of Cubs games in case of emergency.
And I could cut you a good deal on a radio teletype decoder if you’re in the market.
Ehi my income isn’t 67k
It would be interesting to see how Canadian data stacks up against this (excluding Quebec and Northern Canada) DVR technology here has very low usage rates, and I expect that internet streaming is going to prevent DVR penetration from ever being significant, as streams will replace people’s need for a DVR. From this I expect that there is a much higher level of internet streaming in Canada, partially backed up by our high level of non-commercial video piracy.
Jeff, why exclude Quebec? We have DVR technology and most people watch English television anyways.