Tivo owners are nuts

Conventional wisdom says poeple who own Tivos or other brands of digital video recorders speed through or skip past commercials.

It looks like the CW is off the mark.

As reported in the New York Times, media research company Nielsen says DVR users watch most of the ads.

It turns out that a lot of people with digital video recorders are not fast-forwarding and time-shifting as much as advertisers feared. According to new data released yesterday by the Nielsen Company, people who own digital video recorders, or DVRs, still watch, on average, two-thirds of the ads.

One big reason is that many people with DVRs still tune in to watch about half of their shows at the scheduled start time, meaning they must sit through commercials.

And even when people watch recorded shows later, many are not fast-forwarding through the ads. On average, Nielsen found, DVR owners watch 40 percent of commercials that they could skip over ...

Let me just say for the record that people who still endure commercials when they have the ability to avoid them are just plain nuts, and that includes my wife, who stubbornly insists on watching shows when networks schedule them. And she'd rather sit through commercials than bother with hitting the "FF" button on the remote.

Me? I've set up series recordings for my favorite shows (American Experience, Simpsons, The Office, Family Guy, Heroes, etc.) so I can watch them whenever I want to, and skip the commercials. If I choose to watch a show the same night it airs, I wait until at least eight minutes after the start time on a 30-minute program; 16 minutes on a 60-minutes program, etc. This gives me the ability to skip all the ads (although I do stop for those Geico caveman ads). I get deflated when I get the timing wrong and end up watching the last part of a program live.

The only programs I intentionally watch live are news and sports.

So why do DVR owners still watch commercials? Is it because they like the ads? Old habits? What?

Last year I built a DVR using some old PC components, a TV tuner card, and some software I was given called Beyond TV (I call my box "JTvo").

I still find myself watching commercials somtimes, for several reasons: (1) I'm not fully in the habit of skipping them yet; (2) I forget that I'm watching a recording; (3) I let the commercials run while I visit the bathroom or get a snack; or (4) I'm sometimes just too lazy to reach for the remote.

Most of the time, though, I do skip the advertisements because I hate them. Beyond TV has a cool feature that marks the blocks of commercials on recorded shows, and by pressing a button on the remote, I can skip the entire block. This doesn't work when watching live or near-live TV, but I could still use the 30-second button to skip each commercial if I used the technique you describe. Guess that's another habit I'll have to develop.