VCRs, People-Meter: Factors in TV Viewing

Consider that the use of videocassette recorders is on the rise. A year ago, only 39.9% of the nation’s homes with TV had them. Now the A. C. Nielsen Co. estimates that they’re in 53.3% of those homes.

Consider that the ratings company says prime-time TV viewing was down last year, although the industry-wide drop--1% from 1986 levels--”is not significant, statistically,” says Paul Isaacson of Young & Rubicam, a major advertising agency here.

Does it follow, then, that the “major cause” of this small drop was the increase of VCR machines used to play rented tapes?

Yes, in the opinion of CBS research chief David Poltrack. The growth of VCRs, he says, “just about explains the whole decline.”

Gerald Jaffe and Larry Hyams, audience research executives at NBC and ABC, respectively, aren’t so certain. They generally ascribe last year’s slight drop in prime-time viewing to the new people-meter ratings system that Nielsen put into effect Sept. 1.

Nielsen reported earlier this month that the average U.S. household watched less TV in 1987 than in 1986, down from 50 hours and 16 minutes a week to 49 hours and 48 minutes.

ABC’s Hyams says that the machines were a factor in the drop, but not nearly as significant as the new, more sophisticated measurement system. He says that average weekly ratings for playbacks of videotapes rose from 1.5 in 1986 to 2.3 last year. (Each ratings point currently represents 886,000 homes.)

The new viewer-operated ratings system, like its passive predecessor, the audimeter, can tell when a VCR in a monitored home is taping a program. But it can’t identify what is being played back, only that something is being played back.

Jaffe cited cable, which is now available in an estimated 50.5% of the nation’s TV households, as one of the likely causes of the viewing decline. But he isn’t ready to put VCRs on the list because “we don’t have any real handle” on their impact yet, he said.

The consensus seems to be that, with the changeover to the people-meters, and the continuing debate within the industry over the accuracy of the new system, it’s going to take this year and 1989 to sort out the impact and draw valid conclusions.

One problem in trying to assess things, says Isaacson, executive vice president of Young & Rubicam, is that the Nielsen audience sample for last year wasn’t “fully representative of VCR households.”

“It (videocassette playbacks) is probably a bigger factor than we know. But it’s hard to tell right now.”