DVRs Aren’t Killing the 30-Second Advertisement?!

According to this article in The Washington Post, the rapid adoption and use of DVRs apparently isn’t really hurting the television advertising business. The claim is that households with DVRs are watching more TV and therefore offsetting the ads that are skipped.

I don’t buy it…or rather, I don’t buy one key aspect of this argument. First of all, I can honestly say that more individual shows are watched in my household since we got our DVR, so that part of the story seems accurate to me. For example, I rarely used to catch short segments of The Daily Show in my pre-DVR days but now I record it every night and watch them all over the weekend. But, and here’s the kicker, I don’t watch a single ad while I skip through each episode!

I see my wife and kids doing the same thing. There are plenty of shows queued up on our DVR, including many that wouldn’t get watched without this great device. But, any time I’ve sat down with the rest of my family to watch a recorded show we always, and I mean always, skip through the commercials.

Maybe this is a desperate attempt by the networks to distort the data so that they can preserve their advertising income stream. Or, maybe it’s just a misinterpretation of the data by someone else. Either way, I’m 100% convinced that my household isn’t unique and that DVRs are having a significant impact on ad viewership.