DVR Households Swelling Ranks

A report from a consumer analyst group this week is saying that 52.3 million households, or 44% of all homes with a television, will have a DVR within five years.

The findings are significant because they show how quickly people have become accustomed to customizable viewing options since the advent of the TiVo and how these options should grow with customer demand. They also predict the continued erosion of 'appointment television' for prime time network programs, with a kind assist from the millions of content available on the web.

This means we might finally be free of lame prime-time show gimmicks, like having all shows set in a single urban East Coast city lose electricity on a single night and leading to characters awkwardly guesting in ham-fisted plotlines. Or at least we hope so.

The on-demand industry analysts from Magna reported slight gains across the board for all DVR sellers, and found that (of course!) young people are the biggest influencers in the transition to 24/7 access to content, which oftentimes doesn't even include a set-top DVR. I, for one, watch TV content almost exclusively through the net without spending a dime on cable or TiVo, and I know I'm not alone on this one.

Magna senior VP, director of industry analysis Brian Wieser predicts the following DVR-relevant nuggets:

• The number of homes with video-on-demand by 2014: 68.8 million (up from 40.4 million by the end of Q3 2008.)
• The number of homes with broadband access by 2014: 86.2 million (up from 68.3 million this year.)
• The companies with the most homes that (as of December 2008) subscribe to DVR services run in the following order: EchoStar (with 6.4 million households with DVR subscriptions), DirectTV (6.2 million households with DVRs and 36% of total subscribers), Comcast (4.4 million), and Time Warner Cable (about 4 million).

These stats also reveal the tough competition that manufacturers of stand alone set-top boxes will face in the upcoming years. Improved cable company UIs and box offerings, and faster Internet connections (providing increasingly sophisticated free content from sites like Hulu, YouTube, and tens of others, including, hmm, Wired) will pressure them into adapting their boxes for useful efficiency, with dynamic interfaces, and full wireless convergence with it all.

And the biggest user difference, as has been noted many times before, is
the ability of the viewer to find content specifically suited to her,
presumably leading to more judicious TV choices.

Of course, DVR tech comes with plenty of potential baggage: greater company access to user profiles and private preferences, equally sophisticated and annoying ads (see: most streaming ad packages in Hulu), and higher rates for closed premium content.

by Jose Fermoso for Wired.com

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