PVRs will NOT spell the death of advertising funded television?

Our weekly columnist Raymond Snoddy praises an ethnographic study into what people actually do with PVRs. There are caveats, but he believes this “has punctured futuristic nonsense with observation, facts and sound judgement”…

There are few greater pleasures than coming across a piece of research that confirms all your own instincts and at the same time overturns conventional wisdom.

Up and down the media conference platforms of the land you can hear people who should know better spreading doom about personal video recorders (PVRs) and the future of commercial television. Commercial television will soon be dead. When we get our hands on a PVR we all automatically record everything and switch on fast-forward mode and that’s good night for the spot advertisement. Channels are obviously dead too as the viewer concentrates on recording individual programmes from all over the place – a manifestation of the burgeoning on-demand world.

The doom-mongers will find it rather more difficult to make their case in future thanks to work by Professor Patrick Barwise of the London Business School and Sarah Pearson of ACB Actual Consumer Behaviour published last week. Not for the first time Barwise, the marketing academic who seems to actually like television, has punctured futuristic nonsense with observation, facts and sound judgement.

The pair have carried out an ethnographic study – recording from second to second what people actually do with PVRs as opposed to what they are supposed to do or say they do. And guess what? The viewers observed actually use the marvellous devices in an extraordinarily sensible way – that the PVR is ‘grafted’ on to existing viewing routines after favourite programmes have been watched on favourite channels.

Of the 22 adults studied, 21 turned first to programme guides and most of them only turned to the PVR if there was nothing much to watch on the familiar channels. Ethnologists swooping on the Snoddy household, big fans of the PVR, would observe exactly the same pattern.

But it is the numbers that are really interesting. In the homes studied 70 per cent of commercials were seen live and 30 per cent time-shifted. When other sets in the home are included the live viewing of ads rises to 80 per cent. Work by BARB suggests the live proportion could even be as high as 86 per cent. Add to that the fact that advertisements that get the fast-forward treatment are hardly lost entirely because of the detailed attention devoted to the screen as they race through at varying speeds.

On the specific issue of ad avoidance, Barwise concludes that the likely impact of PVRs, at least in the short to medium term, has been greatly exaggerated. The Barwise numbers and expected PVR penetration rates “cast serious doubt” on predictions that the devices will reduce commercial audiences across all homes by 10 per cent in 10 years time. The research also suggests that the shift from live viewing to on-demand over the next 10 years is likely to be less dramatic than many are predicting.

PVR time-shifting, mostly recorded from a few favourite channels, could account for up to 15 per cent of viewing in 10 years and video-on-demand add a further 5 per cent to 10 per cent. So in a decade’s time perhaps as much as 80 per cent of viewing would still be live and that to familiar channels in some form as high as 90 per cent to 95 per cent.

Barwise goes further and argues that such figures are based on optimistic assumptions about both PVRs and VOD use and that his “best guess” assumptions will mean that the impact on channel viewing will be even lower.

All the caveats have to be registered. Its a small ethnographic study, current PVR users may not be typical of the rest of the audience and the funders of the research include the main UK commercial channels. It ought to be possible to scale up some of the findings using BARB data further undermining apocalypse arguments.

It would be really nice to be able to lay one canard about the future firmly to rest. At the very least it should give those forecasting the death of advertising funded television and the death of channels pause for thought – before they open their mouths.