Personal video recorders are having far less impact on viewing habits than was once predicted and currently pose no significant threat to television advertising, according to executives at this year’s Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.
ITV’s marketing and commercial director, Jim Hytner, was just one of a number of senior industry figures to dismiss “doomsday” predictions that viewers are on the brink of abandoning the schedules in favour of new technology that allows them to skip through the commercial breaks.
He said: “The proposition that the audience will prefer to record every single show and watch it later, rather then watch it when the fat controllers present it to them, is pure bollocks. The narrowcast boffins drone on about technology, but it’s actually the shows and the schedule that rule in television.”
Hytner criticised the notion that personal video recorders and video on demand services are eroding the traditional viewing experience and argued that good programming is the key to stopping people changing channels during the ad breaks.
He said: “It’s the schedule that drives surfing, if you have a great schedule then nobody surfs. Consumers still live their lives sequentially, they still watch television sequentially.”
However, Hytner acknowledged that a certain amount of channel hoping is inevitable in increasingly crowded multichannel environment. He said: “At 8 o’clock when 14 million people have just watched Coronation Street, you could have the queen dancing nude with Martin Bashir and viewers would still switch over for EastEnders.”
Last year ITV1 unveiled a new on-air identity as part of the most radical overhaul in its fifty year history. Hytner claimed the overhaul, which included over 100 new idents, a new portfolio of on-screen graphics and a modernised ITV1 logo, had been successful in promoting viewer loyalty. He said: “We believe that we have created a very clean, very coherent juncture, which does stop people surfing.”
Hytner argued that event TV was a vital part of the viewing experience and could not be replaced by the new technologies currently on the market. He said: “As the world fragments and as media fragments the public yearns for event television that they can watch together and can experience together.”
Also speaking at this year’s Television Festival, BBC director general, Greg Dyke, made reference to the MacTaggart lecture he gave three years ago, saying: “I said then I thought personal video recorders like TiVo and Sky Plus would revolutionise our viewing. I still believe that will happen in the long term but so far only 150,000 homes have PVRs, and it will take far longer than I thought for them to have real impact.”
Nonetheless, the potential of personal video recorders is evident from an ongoing study in the US which claims that more than 60% of current users skip through all or most commercials (see INSIGHTanalysis: PVR Users Regularly Avoid Ads).
