Playback time for Nielsens
By Gary Levin
USA Today
The TiVo Nation has arrived.
Nielsen has begun measuring playback on digital video recorders, and the first results are handing a big lift to some of TV's top shows.
As expected, the biggest hits and series in brutally competitive time slots are among the most frequently "time-shifted": Grey's Anatomy, Lost, Survivor, House. Of the 18.8 million Lost fans for last week's season opener, 1 million - or more than 5 percent of the audience - watched the show later Wednesday night.
And NBC's The Office had the biggest percentage of delayed viewers: The show's ratings spiked nearly 7 percent when viewing later Thursday night is counted, and more than 11 percent from viewing up to a week later.
House, starring Hugh Laurie, gained 1.4 million viewers, or 10.5 percent, from tardy fans up to seven days after its Sept. 19 episode, and the Grey's season opener grew 8 percent, adding 1.8 million who watched CSI or did something else instead on Thursday night.
The ratings lifts are even more startling considering that only 12 percent of homes have DVRs, according to unofficial Nielsen estimates, and they account for just 9 percent of Nielsen's ratings sample.
"Those people watch these shows at a much higher rate than the general population," CBS research chief David Poltrack says.
Initiative Media's Stacey Lynn Koerner calls the ratings jump "a big shift. It comes from multiple options, with more shows in competitive time periods that people want to watch. It's a great validation for television."
And it's part of a widening circle of viewing options that include streaming videos or iPod downloads.
When recorded, water-cooler shows such as Grey's and Survivor are most often watched that night; other series (House, CSI) get their biggest bumps days later in the week. Yet viewers almost never record newsmagazines, game shows, Spanish-language telenovelas and sports events.
And while Nielsen expects the ratings lift to accelerate by year's end, when its sample of homes will match the proportion of DVR households, networks can't yet profit from their newfound gains: After advertisers resisted, networks backed off plans to set ad rates that factored in DVR ratings.