Like a tennis match, the debate over the DVR’s place in television watch as been going back and forth for the past couple of years. But now that, according to Nielsen, one in three household uses a DVR (including TiVo and those provided by your cable company), its importance in measurement and actual content production is even higher.
This past quarter I had the opportunity to work on a project for Cisco Systems as part of my Entertainment Marketing class at Medill. Due to the non-disclosure agreement I signed I can’t go into much of the data details, but what I can say is that having data from individual DVR devices and cable set-top boxes will revolutionize what we watch, how we watch and when we find out what’s out there to entertain us.
As owners of Scientific Atlanta, a leader in cable box devices, Cisco provided us with actual household data from one of its cable hubs in order to create new online marketing and content creation to supplement on-air programming. The data set my group obtained contained hundreds of thousands of data points that told us what channels were watched, for how long and at what time of day. That’s a lot of great information for a marketer and a programmer.
With Comcast’s recent joint venture with NBC Universal highlighted in a recent article in Entertainment Weekly, it’s safe to say that media companies know that the power is in the pushes – from the remote control and DVR that is. Sure, it’s a little Big Brother is watching, but what data like this will do is provide viewers with new programs and new ways to watch it – according to what they are actually doing now. In my opinion, it will make for better television and entertainment experiences. Game. Set. Match.
