If you own a TiVo, or a Media Center PC, or a PVR from your cable company, you’re part of an elite. A new research report from Accenture says that the percentage of U.S. homes with personal video recorders will increase by 500% in the next four years, but even in 2009 more than half of U.S. homes still won’t have the equipment to record, pause, or time-shift TV. This summary is at Smartmoney.com:
Accenture’s research estimates that around 40% of U.S. homes will have personal video recorders, or PVRs, by 2009. The technology in PVRs allows viewers to store and record television programs on a set-top box, skipping through advertising segments easily.
About 8% of U.S. homes now have PVR technology, resulting in around 2% of ads being skipped.
The author of the report, media and entertainment partner Theresa Wise, calculates that up to 10% of ads could be skipped by 2009, with as much as $6 billion lost.
What I find fascinating about this story is the overwhelming emphasis on advertising, with the subtext that the advertising industry needs to find a way to prevent us ungrateful consumers from skipping their ads. It always reminds me of this scene from A Clockwork Orange:
Of course, the reporter does mention that there are other reasons besides PVRs for the projections that growth in TV ad revenues will shrink:
A combination of fragmenting television audiences, loss of market share by the big networks to cable channels, and the growth of the personal video recorder, will all contribute to a slowing in the rate of growth of the advertising industry.
They forgot to mention the little fact that a lot of people feel besieged with advertising that has no respect for us as viewers and insults our intelligence, and the PVR is just one way to route around it.
Anyway, the rate of penetration for PVRs in U.S. homes today is about the same as cable TV had in 1980. In other words, there’s lots of room for growth if greedy corporations don’t try to strangle the market.
Ed Bott 
Ed:
Re “They forgot to mention the little fact that a lot of people feel besieged with advertising that has no respect for us as viewers and insults our intelligence, and the PVR is just one way to route around it.”
Words to live by.
Ken
I think the adoption of PVR’s in the home will be much quicker, the question is whether or not people will use them. It should be cheaper for the cable/satellite company to just carry one box.
My small cable company in Ohio has 3 different boxes (Digital Cable, HD, and HD with PVR). How is this efficient when the price difference really isn’t that significant.
However, the cable card may slow down the use of boxes which would balance things out.
Joseph Jaffe has a great VidLit up on this topic titled, “Life After the 30-second Spot.”