When TiVo was launched in 1999, I was one of those techies that purchased one. To be holding a digital video recorder in my arms seemed like a dream come true. I would no longer need to tape the shows I wanted to watch and could order my season pass and everything seemed to be on auto-pilot. It re-scheduled my life and made everything more convenient. What I didn’t understand is that TiVo had a brain and knew the shows I watched and even when to record related shows that I might enjoy. But the bigger event I was not expecting was my ability to watch Monday Night Football and skip every commercial. I was condensing my life by taking away the :30 second ads but not having a clue of what offers were being pushed. At first, I thought this feature was really cool, but being in Advertising and having a thirst to know who is doing what, it started to get stale within the first six months.

In 2000 I began watching the commercials again and realized that if I have seen the spot already then I was approved to fast forward. Then it hit me- most consumers are going to miss the commercials because they aren’t in advertising. How was this going to kill television? It was forcasted in 2009 that 36% of the population will have DVR services by 2012, and presuming all ads were skipped (there is no value to a skipped ad) this would equate to a reduction of 11% of prime time ratings points 10 years after the advent of the DVR. This is equivalent to about 2 years worth of erosion due to viewing patterns shifting from broadcast to cable.

As I see it currently, this is not the case. Despite this widespread hypothesis that DVR ownership would yield lower recall and response to advertisements, in looking at today’s DVR owners, we see that they actually are more likely to have recall of pharmaceutical or prescription drug ads.  For instance, seventy-one percent of DVR owners recall seeing an advertisement for a pharmaceutical or prescription drug in the past twelve months, as compared to 64% of all consumers. However, as DVR ownership becomes more commonplace and consumers become more familiar with the capabilities of the DVR functionality, we may start to see these numbers decline. But for now, marketers can rest easy — DVR owners appear to be highly media-savvy consumers who are still tuning in to ads.

TiVo just added Netflix, Amazon On Demand, Blockbuster OnDemand, YouTube, and countless streaming music channels. All new ways to incorporate commercials. Today there’s a new revolution in electronics that’s redefining not only when you watch TV, but where. Even though timeshifting allowed you to watch television on your schedule, you still had to be in front of your TV when it came time to watch a show. Today, new pioneers like California-based Sling Media are introducing the next big concept called placeshifting, and the results of this new focus is bringing new products and technologies that allow you to watch and listen to your favorite television shows anywhere in the world.

But even the notion of erosion as the futurist are predicting is a false one. As both cable and DVRs contribute to higher total viewership of television and disregards that with annual population growth of 1% per year, total television impressions will rise by about 20% over a 10 year period.

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