As DVRs Shift TV Habits, Ratings Calculations Follow
By BRIAN STELTER October 6, 2013
One day after Fox introduced the Headless Horseman drama "Sleepy Hollow" last month, the television world was impressed by its overnight rating, a 3.4 among adults age 18 to 49. Fox knew it would grow: based on last season's viewing trends, Fox figured the premiere episode would finish between a 5.1 and a 5.4 rating once seven days of digital video recorder playback were added.
Evidently, even the network's rosiest outlook wasn't rosy enough. When the seven-day data came in on Sunday, it showed that the premiere episode scored a 5.8 rating, a gain of fully two-thirds from its starting point.
That's what live television is these days - just a starting point. On-demand viewing behaviors, which have been reshaping television since the first TiVo DVR was shipped in 1999, are becoming more pronounced with each passing year, sometimes to the benefit of networks and advertisers and other times to their detriment.
What is notable about the start of the new fall TV season, according to network executives, is a surge in not just delayed viewing, but very-delayed viewing. Some people who might have previously time-shifted the new NBC drama "The Blacklist" by one day, for example, are now waiting longer to watch, partly because of the sheer number of shows on their mental to-watch lists.
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DVR's are going to shift network programming in more ways than that: they will, IMNSHO, be both the death and salvation of mass entertainment.
Those whom use DVR's to "binge view" a TV series soon realize that they are incredibly insipid morality plays, with little but a passing nod to any notion of art or complexity. Ergo, viewers soon realize that it's *ALL* the same: all the actresses wear tight sweaters, all the men are studly, vacuous fools, and the Tall White Guy (TM) makes all the decisions. This leads, of course to viewers hitting "Off" in ever-greater numbers, and when enough of them do it, the tried-and-trite twelve stories Hollywood has recycled for decades will be replaced by new kinds of entertainment that actually challenge the viewers' minds as well as their trigger fingers.
Bill Horne Moderator