How many people watch TV on live TV? TV wouldn’t work without commercials but if nobody watches them, how do TV shows get made?
Tivo currently has a little over 2 million subscribers. I don’t know how many people are using Comcast or other DVRs, but I would guess it’s in the same range. Assuming there are maybe 10 million DVRs out there, and many tens of millions of TVs, I would guess a lot of people are still not able to fast-forward through commercials. But I’ve wondered the same thing myself: when revenue from selling 30-second spots falls off because too few viewers are sitting through the commercials, the business model that makes “free” TV programs happen is going to crumble.
If you think product placement is bad now…
I read a survey (that i can’t find right at the moment) that a surprisingly large percentage of DVR users just use them to time shift and don’t bother to fast forward through the commercials.
wow… in NYC EVERYONE has digital cable (some type of DVR box) except for the very poor
But how many of them actually use the DVR functionality? And of those who do, how many skip commercials?
Yes, it does in a sense take more effort to skip commercials than to let them play, particularly if you have the TV on while you’re doing something else, as opposed to giving it your full attention.
well, the survey mentioned on this thread caught me by surprise… i would of said everyone FF commercials… i guess not
I think i was thinking of the Nielson study referenced in this article. It was done in 2009 and I don’t see much since then. I wonder if things have changed the last few years. Aside from perhaps a moderate increase in product placement, advertisers still seem to be advertising.
When I have the option of skipping over an ad on YouTube, maybe one time in ten I end up watching the ad because it’s interesting.
Maybe ads will improve?
My prediction is this: when fast forwarding gets too widespread, they will start devoting screen real estate during the program to advertising. Maybe a band across the bottom with a scroll of ad copy. Or maybe just static images. Or worse yet, eye-catching moving images, like you see on web pages. The plus side: no interruptions. The downside: no avoiding them.
My DVR doesn’t have a magic Skip button: when I fast-forward through commercials, I am watching them, just at high speed, because I want to resume play right at the end of the commercial break.
I end up identifying every product being advertised (or at least categories: “cars” “shampoo” “more cars” “ad for TV program” “laundry detergent” “big-budget movie” “Conservative propaganda”). If I see an ad I don’t recognise, I do pay attention at least once. If it really looks interesting (swimsuits/cats/dogs/spaceships) I’ll rewind and watch the ad at normal speed.
It used to that the last commercial in a break would always be for another program on the same channel (you’re watching Dirty Jobs and they have an ad for Deadliest Catch), so you could skip until you saw one of those. They are now wiser and show the ads in random order.
So yes, I do watch the ads, and I read somewhere that commercials are now designed so that the product name will be recognisable even in fast-forward.
We watch most of the programmes on the commercial channels as recordings, so that we can skip through the ads. Over the last few years we have noticed two things. First that we have more, shorter ad breaks - ok only maybe one more per hour, but it is significant because secondly, most programmes are sponsored.
Our skip button jumps about 30 seconds each time and the trick is to watch for the sponsored ad and stop skipping - this means that we see those ads a lot.
If we forget to record something and get it online, (the TV has a broadband link) it doesn’t allow skipping through the ads at the beginning.
I suspect that there are still a great many people who want to watch a show live - even if it is a recording. I have no idea why, but I know people who insist on watching (for example) Britains Got Talent live. We record it so that we can skip the ads and the dross and the rubbish commentary.
I don’t fast forward - for me, ads are for getting up and grabbing a snack from the kitchen or running to the bathroom quick. 
This is already a thing, at least for network/channel promos. Annoying as hell, too.
Commercials are also about creating brand awareness, even if the viewer doesn’t see enough of the commercial to hear the advertisers message, they’ll still remember brand xyz when they go shopping (and might even remember a selling point or two).
Other factors for commercials:
- (already mentioned) viewers that multitask
- a trend towards more interesting commercials
- even if people walk away during a commerical break, there’s a chance they’ll still catch a few seconds when they check to see if their show is back on.
- old(er) people
Digital Cable doesn’t necessarily equal DVR. I have two HD cable boxes that do not have DVR functionality. Comcast wants more money for that feature and cable and internet are already close to $200 a month without it.
I guess there are still TV commercials for the same reason there are internet commercials. Even though it’s trivially easy to get an adblocker and rarely see an ad on the net many people don’t bother to do so. Again, although the functionality is there for many to avoid TV ads a lot of people won’t bother to use it.
Maybe if you adblock or fastforward, companies don’t want to bother with you?
It’s the same deal with the CALL LAWYER NOW ads. They’re there to reel in their target customer… which is not you. So, no loss if you skip those ads, you’re probably the target in some other way (newspaper advertising, billboards, product placement, social networking)
In addition to what’s been mentioned above, there’s sports. We rarely watch TV programs at the time they are broadcast…except for sporting events, which tend to get ‘spoiled’ if we wait a few days. Since we’re watching live, we have no choice but to sit through the commercials (or get up to go to the bathroom, do the laundry, etc.)