TiVo singlehandedly changed the way that many viewers watch television, allowing consumers to record their favorite shows and time-shift their viewing altogether.
Increasingly, time-shifted viewing is having an enormous impact on television ratings, and the networks have begun to consider the uptick in DVR-viewing when calculating their overall ratings. According to the data provided by TiVo to The Daily Beast, the shows with the highest aggregated rating of time-shifted viewing during the 2011–12 season are the usual suspects: Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Glee, and NCIS, to name a few. In other words: popular shows become even more popular once TiVo examines the overall time-shifted viewing. This is not a surprise.
What is interesting, however, is TiVo's data that illustrates the percentage of the total viewing of a given show that was time-shifted. (TiVo calls this measurement "Percentage Time-Shifted Viewing.") For instance: Showtime’s dark comedy Nurse Jackie has the highest percentage of time-shifted viewing out of any primetime show on television. Shows as varied as Mad Men, Fringe, and Switched at Birth are also on the list. (Community, meanwhile, ranks at No. 164, just behind An Idiot Abroad and Survivor.)
A few caveats before we dive in: The data provided comes from TiVo’s Stop||Watch ratings service, which “passively and anonymously” collects DVR viewing data from a sample group of 350,000 nationally distributed TiVo DVR subscribers. (That sample group represents roughly 17.5 percent of TiVo’s overall subscriber base of approximately 2 million customers.) Additionally, TiVo considers any viewing that takes place five seconds after the live broadcast as being “time-shifted.” As for the Percentage Time-Shifted Viewing figures we’re looking at: higher percentage time-shifted scores indicates preference on the part of viewers to watch the specific show time-shifted than live, independent of the overall popularity of the show.
Shocker: Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, about a recovering addict (Edie Falco) who is super-amazing at her job as a nurse and painfully awful at her personal life, has the highest percentage of time-shifted viewing, clocking in at a staggering 89.3 percent. To put it another way, among the TiVo sample group, less than 11 percent of those viewers are watching this show live. But the show’s recent time slot this season may have a lot to do with that: In addition to network competition, it aired opposite HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen’s PDX-set sketch comedy Portlandia broke into the public consciousness (or, okay, the hipster zeitgeist) in a major way this season, the show’s second. But for all of those hipsters raving about the indie-spirit comedy’s oddball sketches, very few of them were actually watching the show live. Portlandia, in fact, ranked second.
Chris Hornbecker
Syfy’s quirky sci-fi dramedy Eureka is currently wrapping up its fifth and final season, but one has to wonder whether the fact that viewers are clearly preferring to watch this show on a time-shifted basis rather than live has anything to do with this? Eureka landed at No. 3 on the list, with a substantial majority of the show’s audience at using time-shifted viewing.
Art Streiber /Syfy
Interestingly, Sunday night shows turn up again and again on this list, especially ones airing in the 10 p.m. hour. Whether it’s a case of too much competition on a tremendously busy television night (which, incidentally, has the highest proportion of viewers), the list is riddled with programs that compete for viewers on Sunday nights. Is it a case of viewers choosing their favorites to watch live? Or a sense that they’re being saved for work-week viewing? Showtime’s serial killer drama Dexter, which stars Michael C. Hall as a Miami slayer, landed at No. 4.
Showtime
That theory about 10 p.m. viewing may have something to do with Mad Men also being toward the top of the list as well. Given that the AMC drama attracts a slightly older audience overall, perhaps it has become easier for fans to record the 10 p.m. broadcast and watch it the following day. Or is it that audiences like to speed through the commercials? After all, TiVo’s Stop||Watch system considers time-shifting viewing to be anything more than five seconds after the start of the live broadcast. Hmmm ...
USA’s In Plain Sight ended its five-season run earlier this year. Like the previous entries, In Plain Sight—which revolved around an Albuquerque-based deputy U.S. marshall (Mary McCormack)—aired at 10 p.m. ET/PT, but unlike its fellow late-evening programs, it airs on Friday nights. While the broadcasters have attempted to air originals on Fridays, they have received mixed results (though NBC may have landed a semi-hit in Grimm this season) given the fact that many television viewers aren’t sitting in front of the television on Friday nights. USA has had some success with originals on Fridays, but In Plain Sight would appear to be heavily time-shifted due to the timeslot.
Robert Ascroft / USA Network
Perhaps Wednesdays at 10 p.m. is just too late for fans of TV Land’s female-centric comedy Hot in Cleveland, which features the now-ubiquitous Betty White, Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, and Wendie Malick? More than three-fourths of the show’s viewers opted to watch it time-shifted rather than live.
Evans Ward / PictureGroup
Increased competition at 10 p.m. on Tuesday evenings—with Justified, Southland, Parenthood, and others all vying for audiences—have meant that viewers have had to pick which shows to watch live and which to time-shift. While the overall ratings of Justified have been healthy, it’s surprising to see FX’s modern Western—starring Timothy Olyphant as trigger-happy lawman Raylan Givens—end up in the Top 20 shows. By an overwhelming margin, most of the sample preferred to watch the show time-shifted this past season, the show’s third.
Frank Ockenfels III / FX
Interestingly, only two network shows (The Vampire Diaries and Fringe) even turn up in the Top 20, and the two that do are cult shows. As I mentioned before, the chance to skip television ads may weigh heavily in the decision to time-shift viewing, and the audience for the CW’s supernatural soap The Vampire Diaries appear to do so in force.
The CW Network
Syfy’s supernatural drama Sanctuary was axed after airing its fourth season, which wrapped up in December 2011. Given the high percentage of time-shifted viewing (and declining ratings overall), this may come as no surprise. Sanctuary, which starred Amanda Tapping and Robin Dunne, landed at No. 10 on the list, with most viewers not watching the live broadcast, which aired on Friday nights.
Joe Pugliese / Syfy
USA’s mystery-comedy Psych, starring Dule Hill and James Roday, which aired its sixth season on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. this past season, landed at No. 11, with the sample audience opting to time-shift rather than watch live.
Alan Zenuk / USA Network
Leverage, TNT’s conman drama, saw similar trends. Airing on Sundays at 10 p.m., Leverage’s audience among TiVo’s sample group opted to time-shift in droves, rather than watching the live TNT broadcast.
A surprising entry, ABC Family’s inspirational family drama Switched at Birth enters the fray at No. 13, with the show’s young demographic choosing to watch via time-shifting en masse. Is it a case of an overcrowded Tuesday night schedule? Or is it another example of viewers’ active dislike and avoidance of commercials?
Proving perhaps that the sartorial-challenge show has seen better days, Project Runway lands in the Top 20 at No. 14, the only reality show to land this high on the list. Why is this particularly telling? For one, viewers typically don’t want to be spoiled about the results of elimination competition shows, but if viewers aren’t entirely captivated by the show, they might be willing to put it off or watch another show first.
Another USA entry in the Top 20, with Miami-set espionage drama Burn Notice—which stars Jeffrey Donovan, Bruce Campbell, Gabrielle Anwar, and Sharon Gless—landing at No. 15, with the sample viewers overwhelmingly preferring time-shifted viewing. Interestingly, Burn Notice aired the second half of its fifth season on Thursdays at 10 p.m. and moved an hour earlier to 9 p.m. for its sixth season, which began in June.
Joe Pugliese / USA Network
Airing Mondays at 9 p.m., Syfy’s Being Human, the American adaptation of the hit British supernatural drama, is 16th on the list.
Jeff Riedel / Syfy
Fringe, which received an 11th-hour reprieve from Fox, will air its fifth and final season this fall, a truncated 13-episode run that will tie up plot strands for its small but devoted audience. Its move to Friday nights greatly affected its ratings overall, and a vast majority of those watching did so via time-shifting, according to TiVo’s Stop||Watch ratings system, rather than live on Fridays.
Andrew Matusik / FOX
Showtime’s cancer comedy, The Big C, starring Laura Linney, which aired its third season on Sunday nights at 9:30 p.m. this past season, saw similar trends as other Sunday-night programming, with the sample group engaged in time-shifted viewing.
After a critical and audience backlash at the end of its first season, The Killing returned and dropped more than 30 percent of its audience between seasons. During the second season, AMC opted to schedule the mystery drama—which revolves around the investigation into the murder of a teenage girl in rain-slicked Seattle—against the might of HBO’s fantasy-drama Game of Thrones. Not only did the ratings suffer and continued to fall over the course of Season 2, but the vast majority would appear to be watching other programs during the Sundays at 9 p.m. timeslot. Last Friday, AMC announced it had canceled the once-promising, woeful show.
Frank Ockenfels / AMC
Showtime’s subversive family dramedy Shameless—which depicts the raucous and rowdy Gallagher clan in Chicago—tied with AMC’s The Killing in terms of percentage of time-shifting viewing, landing in joint 19th place. Could it be that some of the audience for the critically adored remake were watching CBS’s Chicago-set legal drama The Good Wife at 9 p.m. on Sundays?
Showtime
