Secrets for Successful Commercial Skipping
Taming the DVR
It’s no secret that DVR (Digital Video Recorder) owners terrify the ad industry. This device makes it simple to skip commercials. As the number of DVR owners approaches fifty-percent of the TV viewing market, the value of an expensive commerical drops drastically. Oddly, those of us who have DVR’s are learning how networks schedule those commerical breaks.
There are two major advantages in having a DVR: the machine records programs without a lot of hassle so that you can view you favorite shows anytime you want, and you can skip over commercials. DVR’s allow you to pick a program from an advanced schedule and automatically record it (or an entire series). Most let you search for programs of interest. This is great for you, but not so good for the networks. They sell ads based on “prime time”. If it is as easy to watch a program that was broadcast at 4am as it is to watch one at 9pm, it’s hard to convince an advertiser to spend more money for that 9pm spot. Also, there is the matter of skipping commercials entirely.
That’s right, no commericals. It’s easy. My DVR, from DirecTV, has a control that allows fast forwarding 30 seconds each time the button is pushed. Broadcasters group commericals into what they call “pods”. Each pod lasts anywhere from 90 seconds to four minutes. If you figure out how long pods will last, you can skip ahead past the advertising. There is a bit of a trick to doing this. Most broadcasters use a similar pattern for their pods. The first one, usually between four and seven minutes into the program, lasts two minutes plus a few seconds. Depressing the control four times gets you through most of it. The later you go in a show, the longer the pods. Toward the end of Gray’s Anatomy, ABC’s pods are four minutes long (8 button presses). On average, most networks make their later pods between three and four minutes. When they break for local commercials (all networks have at least one “availability” per half hour for affiliates to make money), these pods are almost always at least three-and-a-half minutes long.
For many, this has become a game; guessing how many 30-second button presses are needed to completely miss commercials. Of course, to play this game, you have to pre-record programs. This doesn’t work on shows you watch in real time. It’s gotten to the point for many early adopters, that they are unaware when their favorite programs actually air. In our house, we watch television when we can, and almost always from our play list of pre-recorded programs. We have the DVR set to record the Today show on a satellite channel from the East Coast (we are in the Pacific time zone). That way, when we wake up, usually at 6:30am, we just start watching the NY Today Show. We skip the commercials, so that between 6:30 and 7:10am, we see the entire first hour of the show. The Today show takes seven-minute local news breaks twice in that first hour. We don’t get to see our local weather, but we find looking out the window takes care of that issue.
TV has changed drastically in the last few years. Our DirecTV subscription brings us over 600 channels of programming. Still, there are many times where we can’t find anything we want to watch. But with the ability to easily record programs of interest regardless of when they are aired, we see what we want, when we want, and without commericals. That’s truly technology you can use.