As DVRs Shift TV Habits, Ratings Calculations Follow

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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.

“We believe that the four- to seven-day lift is going to be significantly higher this year than last year,” said David F. Poltrack, the chief research officer at CBS.

This is simultaneously good and bad for CBS and its counterparts — good because a higher total rating after seven days helps prove that television networks can still spawn hugely popular shows, even in an age of media fragmentation, but bad because advertisers aren’t currently paying for all the viewers who come along later. Changes in viewer behavior continue to outpace changes in the television business model.

“Most viewing is still occurring during the first three days, but if more viewing continues to shift to four-to-seven, or beyond, we won’t be getting fully compensated,” Joe Earley, chief operating officer of Fox Broadcasting, said in an e-mail.

That’s because most ads are bought and sold based on three days of live and on-demand commercial viewing. The more viewing that happens after the three-day mark, the more aggressive the networks will become about trying to charge for seven days of viewing.

But they’re chasing a ball that shrinks as it bounces along. While studies affirm that DVR users don’t skip every ad, everyone agrees that they do skip some. The newest DVRs let users record virtually every show they’d ever have time to watch, and more. And new ad-skipping technologies are emerging all the time, like Dish Network’s AutoHop, which automatically bypasses the ads on every prime-time network telecast.

To be sure, the majority of television is still watched live; only half of American households with televisions even have DVRs. But most directional arrows are pointing toward on-demand’s dominance in the future, thanks to services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or the DVR.

Already, a handful of relatively small shows on cable, like IFC’s “Portlandia” and BBC America’s “Copper,” have had their ratings more than double thanks to seven days of DVR playback. (Seven-day data usually takes several weeks to be compiled.) FX’s “The Bridge” is the latest (and highest-rated) show to make such a claim. Weekly telecasts of the first season, which began in July, have been averaging 827,000 viewers age 18 to 49 in the overnights, which include live viewership as well as same-night DVR playback; the totals have been more than doubling to 1.68 million with seven days of DVR playback.

Variety, in an article last week about “The Bridge,” theorized that some people wait before they watch “10 p.m. dramas with complicated story lines that may require more attention and mental energy than people can muster at the end of a long day.”

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