PVRs don't kill commercials; people kill commercials...

...says commenter Paul over at the PVRblog. And the new numbers from Nielsen (MediaDailyNews) on TV viewing figures seem to confirm this - viewing figures now fall by 15% during the commercial breaks. Quite apart from whether people are watching less television (they are) or using their PVRs to skip the ads (of course they are) the real issue is that ever since they had enough channels to be able to surf away when the ads started, TV viewers have been surfing away for five minutes of MTV as soon as they saw a commercial break coming up.

(Before they had ten thousand channels they went to make a cup of tea instead, of course, but no-one except the electricity companies and the BBC was measuring that so the TV networks were more-or-less able to ignore that detail when they came to cost out their advertising slots.)

In his book The Vanishing Newspaper US media academic Philip Meyer showed that every (US) generation since the second world war has contained fewer newspaper readers than the last. One of the key learnings from his book is that it is fatuous in the extreme to blame a decline in newspaper readers that has been going on for more than sixty years on a technology such as the web that has been available for perhaps a quarter of that period.

And in the same way, TV execs who are now bemoaning the impact of PVRs on their ad-supported business model are somewhat missing the point. PVRs don't kill commercials; people kill commercials. People were killing commercials - by swapping channel or simply leaving the room - before there were PVRs. PVRs just made it easier, and gave us a clear alternative behaviour to measure. The keys to these puzzles are the shortcomings of the basic product and the consumer's preference for something better, not the technologies that are alleged to "disrupt" industries simply by making it easier for consumers to make their preferences felt.