DVRs rise but only a fifth of stored content viewed
Joseph O'Halloran ©RapidTVNews | 13-01-2011
New survey data from Centris Research has highlighted the continuing growth of digital video recorders (DVRs) in US homes though it also reveals that such take-up has not been matched by a commensurate spike in viewing of the TV programmes stored.
In its research note, Centris calculated that by October 2010 there were over 42 million DVRs in US households and that the DVR had fast become one of the dominant forms of time-shifted content viewing, and the most commonly used means for viewing on-demand or time-shifted video programs. Indeed such a penetration rate makes it twice as prevalent as Netflix subscriptions, and three times that of paid VOD movie viewing.
Over half of households with current generation video game systems and Blu-ray players, and just under half of households with HDTV and broadband, have DVRs as well. The analyst added that 37% of all households had at least one DVR, with DVR households having 1.3 DVRs on average and the incidence of multiple-DVR households also on the rise.
Given that there was a market of over 56 million households with TV service still not using DVRs, the analyst was confident that there is a substantial potential for growth in DVR use. Yet qualitative data revealed t ha this was not necessarily the case as device utilisation for watching stored TV and video content was surprisingly low: on average only about a fifth of TV programmed stored were actually viewed.
It was also found that 17% of DVR households do not use DVRs at all for TV viewing, while only 3% of such households use DVRs for all or nearly all (91%-100%) TV viewing. Almost a quarter of DVR households use the devices for between 1% and 10% of all TV viewing.
In terms of device sourcing, three quarters of DVR households rent their device from their TV service providers, while a fifth bough their machine. To operators and service providers, the DVR community is certainly one worth cultivating. Centris discovered that DVR households with DVRs, whether standalone or rented from TV service providers, have higher monthly TV service bills on average than those without.
This differential was most pronounced with cable TV and fibre TV subscribers among whom average monthly bill was about 6%-7% higher when the DVR was rented rather than owned as a standalone device. The analyst did however concede that this could be attributable to the fact that once purchased, standalone DVRs entail no additional monthly cost of TV service while rented DVRs do.
