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"   Americans love television, but we hate commercials. But love &amp;#039;em or hate &amp;#039;em, the ads that interrupt our favorite shows for around 16 minutes of every hour have been the price we pay for free programming. The FCC gives away portions of the radio spectrum to television broadcasters for free, and they in turn give us television for free, making their profits by selling a portion of that airtime to advertisers hawking products\u2014everybody wins... sort of.  It just so happens that technology is changing the delicate balance of the broadcasting world and, in the process, the basic measurements and accounting that the entire industry relies upon.  The digital video recording revolution, started in 1999 by TiVo (and its oft-forgotten competitor, ReplayTV), has been eagerly embraced by consumers who enjoy the flexibility that the machines afford. And it&amp;#039;s easy to understand why: DVR fundamentally changes the experience of watching television. First, it allows users to record programs to an internal hard drive for later viewing. Second, it lets viewers disrupt live TV\u2014pause, rewind and, perhaps most importantly, fast forward (for delayed or recorded programming). It&amp;#039;s worth mentioning that all of this functionality has been available for decades to anyone willing to negotiate the Byzantine programming menus of an ordinary VCR. But where VCRs were clunky, DVRs are elegant. They appropriate the easy-to-use playback functionality of VCRs, while integrating the recording process into basic channel navigation. I&amp;#039;ve seen the attractiveness of this interface in my own home. My wife is no stranger to technological gadgetry (it&amp;#039;s the main source of clutter around our home), but she is a tough critic. For her, it is not enough for a product to do something innovative; no, the innumerable high-tech doodads around the house must be of obvious and immediate utility to gain her stamp of approval. Our Scientific Atlanta DVR is my wife&amp;#039;s favorite digital toy, and she has learned to postpone the start of her favorite shows by 20 minutes (a phenomenon known as &amp;quot;time shifting&amp;quot;), since that generally assures her that she can zoom through the commercials to catch up with the show exactly at its end. It&amp;#039;s more than just a convenience to her; she enjoys it as if avoiding commercials were a game, and chides me when I forget to fast-forward through the ads.  I&amp;#039;ve heard similar sentiments from friends. They feel as if DVR has empowered them to take back their television-watching experience from the advertisers. Frankly, I&amp;#039;m not sure where this adversarial attitude toward advertising came from, but I have a theory. I think the irritation with ads is a result of the success of the cable and satellite industries. Over the past 30-or-so years, Americans have slowly been seduced into the idea of paying a monthly fee for access to television. With that shift has also come an astronomical increase in channels, giving subscribers a sense of entitlement about their programming (&amp;quot;I pay $60 a month, so why do I have to watch commercials?&amp;quot;) as well as an endless variety of options, so boring programming and advertising go by the wayside. Complicating matters further, the cable and satellite industries have been the main distributors of DVR technology. Now a hard-drive recorder set top box is just another part of the monthly bill, like HBO or the NBA Season Pass sports package. And people are embracing DVR\u201417 percent of households have the recordders\u2014to the point where the basic measurements of a program&amp;#039;s appeal are beginning to lose their meaning. In response, the advertising industry has been pressuring Neilsen, the company that for years has been rating audience share, to move from its established &amp;quot;program rating&amp;quot; system to an &amp;quot;ad rating&amp;quot; system. And Neilsen is doing just that. Two weeks ago, Neilsen announced that it would release regular ad ratings that included data from DVR playback. The collection of this data isn&amp;#039;t entirely new\u2014ad ratings have been around since January, and Neilsen has collected DVR data for a year and a half. But the systemic use of ad ratings as one of the standard metrics for assessing viewership is a sea change, and it&amp;#039;s perhaps the sign that as an industry, broadcasters and advertisers are sailing into uncharted waters. Why should this matter to us\u2014you, me, my wife? Because if the way television is funded changes, then the way it&amp;#039;s programmed probably will, too. Neilsen tracks a randomly selected sample audience of 10,000 households (about 30,000 people). The households that have DVR apparently time-shift 42 percent of prime-time programming, and about 40 percent of the commercials in those time-shifted programs are not fast-forwarded by viewers. The New York Times recently reported that broadcasters had expressed relief over this statistic, though I can&amp;#039;t imagine why, since this sort of metric opens up TV shows to a new kind of scrutiny, wherein the popularity of a show may have less to do with its success than its ability to make you stop to watch the ads. In fact, it may well make television a lot more like the Web, where click-throughs and page views blend together into a measure of Web site &amp;quot;stickiness&amp;quot;.  Which is sort of appropriate, since, technologically speaking, TV is slowly evolving toward a more Internet-like medium. Digital television and video-on-demand are already virtually identical to Internet streaming video, and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) promises to eventually merge Internet and television technology for good. For advertisers, that may mean more targeted ads that are personalized to the interests of viewers, and therefore less likely to be skipped. But what may get lost in all of this is the sense of community that broadcast television introduced into our culture\u2014television may cease to be a mass-audience medium. There&amp;#039;s no guarantee that at any one time the lion&amp;#039;s share of American TV watchers are tuning into Ed Sullivan, or &amp;quot;All in the Family,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Seinfeld.&amp;quot; People are still watching, but they&amp;#039;re watching what they want on their own time. \u2014Glenn Derene Glenn Derene, Senior Technology Editor  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a1747/4217964/>