Ten years ago this week, a black box was demonstrated at a broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas. TiVo's digital video recorder (DVR) was expensive: The cheapest model cost $499. But it was hailed as revolutionary. It was much more flexible and easier to program than a videocassette recorder. It allowed people to record and play back at the same time, so they could start watching a program 20 minutes after it had started and fast-forward through all the advertisements. Experts forecast a severe, perhaps fatal, blow to advertising-supported television.
"For quite a few years people thought it was going to mean the demise of the television business," said Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC. Yet DVRs have done little damage. They may even have protected television and made it more conservative.
On one point the Cassandras were correct. As prices fell and cable and satellite firms began to bundle DVRs with other services, their popularity soared. According to Nielsen, a media-research outfit, 29 percent of American homes now have one. The boxes are in a higher proportion of the households advertisers most care about. Jack Wakshlag of Turner Broadcasting, a cable company, calculates that DVR-owning households earn about $20,000 more than average. Yet those households do not use them nearly as much as one might expect. Families with DVRs seem to spend 15 to 20 percent of their viewing time watching prerecorded shows and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5 percent of television is time-shifted and less than 3 percent of all advertisements are skipped. Mitigating that loss, people with DVRs watch more television.
Just because technology enables people to do something does not mean they will, particularly when it comes to a medium as indolence-inducing as television. And people have become lazier. Early adopters of DVRs used them a lot -- not surprisingly, since they paid so much for them. Later adopters use them much less. Far from being revolutionary, in some ways DVR has made television more stable. With the exception of live events it is broadly true that the most popular program are recorded the most. Wakshlag describes it as "a hit-saving machine."
