Live Is Live

We wrote recently about the power of ‘live’ sports and suggested that this will be the one of the few types of content that people would still buy. The power of live is also supported by recent statistics of DVR usage. Current content such as news, sports and American Idol is not as recorded as dramas and comedies. The NYT says:

Shows with content that can be quickly eclipsed by the news, broadly speaking, do not do well in DVR playback. Sports and news, for example, have almost no deferred viewing. That goes for contest shows, too.

“People know the next day that Sanjaya’s been voted out,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, an ad-buying agency. “So there’s an immediacy to watching it live, or as close to live as you can.”

On April 4th 1.4 million homes recorded American Idol on their DVRs in the US but 2.5 million recorded that night’s episode of Lost.

Usual DVR Fare Is Not News and Sports – New York Times