DVR a ‘frienemy’ of television programs

Figuring out a prime-time schedule is usually one of CW Entertainment President Dawn Ostroff’s most important duties. Never, however, has it seemed to matter less.

The promise inherent in digital video recorders -- that viewers can be in control of their own TV schedules -- is rapidly being fulfilled this fall, and the business is changing around it. Nearly 30% of the nation’s homes with TVs have at least one.

Nowhere is the effect more apparent than at the CW, where the practice of recording the shows and watching them later accounts for nearly 17% of the network’s viewership over a one-week period.

Two years ago, it was less than 5%, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The time-shifting is more dramatic for individual shows. The CW even had a week where the audience of 18- to 34-year-old women for “90210” increased a stunning 79% over the live broadcast.

Viewing for ABC, CBS and NBC programs are all more than 10% time-shifted now too. Fox’s programming is only 8% time-shifted this fall, in large part because it has shown postseason baseball, which very few people watch later.

“More and more people are changing the way they consume television,” said Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s chief research executive. “In the next few years, we will rewrite all the rules.”

The most time-shifted show is NBC’s “The Office,” where 28% of its audience watched it sometime other than Thursdays at 9 p.m, Nielsen said. Action shows and serialized dramas, such as “Fringe,” “Heroes” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” have big time-shifted audiences. Not surprisingly, young people are the quickest to adapt to new technology.

Among the least time-shifted shows this fall were “Deal or No Deal,” “60 Minutes” and “King of the Hill.”

With “The Office,” time-shifting has kept alive a show that might otherwise be dead. The comedy has the week’s toughest time slot, competing directly against CBS’ more popular “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The flip side is that DVRs make it harder for new shows such as NBC’s just-canceled “My Own Worst Enemy” to get established. Given the choice of trying something new or watching a recorded version of a favorite show, the DVR usually wins out.

“I call the DVR our ‘frienemy,’ ” Wurtzel said.

Time-shifting has played a prominent part in the decline of the 10 p.m. time slot, where a powerhouse like NBC’s “ER” ruled television not too long ago.

Only three of Nielsen’s top 20 prime-time shows a week ago started at that hour, all of them on CBS.

Many viewers are recording shows from 8 or 9 p.m. and watching them later, after dinner or when the kids go to bed, instead of what’s on live at 10 p.m. This phenomenon hurts late-night programming too.

“The biggest single competitor to network programming in any time slot now is [pre-recorded] network programming,” said David Poltrack, chief researcher at CBS.

Networks are likely to continue to concentrate their top shows in an earlier hour.

Some executives can even see a day when networks stop putting high-cost scripted series at 10 p.m. altogether, although there’s pressure from local stations to provide strong lead-ins to their late-night news shows.

The networks’ weekly ratings score card, a traditional psychic barometer, also means less. It’s based on live viewing, plus playbacks within 24 hours. One recent week the broadcast networks were down 10% from the previous year -- an alarming sign of failure on its face -- but add in a week’s worth of time-shifters and the decline was only 3%, Poltrack said.

Asked whether the increased time-shifting helped the networks, Fox chief scheduler Preston Beckman was as ambivalent as Wurtzel.

“It’s a little of both,” he said. It’s always encouraging that viewers watch the shows, whenever they do it. But advertising rates are calculated based on people who watch a show within three days of its original airing. So if you tape “House” on Tuesday to watch Saturday night, Fox gets nothing for it.

CBS’ Poltrack believes that DVR usage will continue to grow until the machines are in about half of the nation’s homes with TVs. He expects the technology to become obsolete soon after that, because more people will have televisions and computers working together to give them even more freedom to program their personal networks.

“We basically have reached the point now where everyone realizes that it’s in everyone’s best interests to make popular programming available so people can watch it any time they want to watch it,” he said.