In today’s time consuming country many Americans are finding it harder and harder to sit in front of the TV at a designated time. So the DVR (TiVo) comes into play to help many Americans time-shift their TV and catch their favorite shows when they want.

This causes a problem though. It becomes harder to judge the rating of a show due to these devices. Nielsen is the rating system that we use in the U.S.. They have developed away to monitor these devices, but not thoroughly successful. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia, “In 2005, Nielsen began measuring the usage of digital video recordings (TiVo, for example) and initial results indicate that time-shifted viewing will have a significant impact on television ratings. The networks are not yet figuring these new results into their ad rates at the resistance of advertisers.” Because of this many shows that have huge DVR fan bases such as Jericho for example are being cancelled, but that’s not due to the lack of viewers.

I am not a fan of Jericho and I have never seen the show, but I understand how these viewers feel. In response to the cancellation by CBS recently, many loyal “fans have sent a total of $26,000 for a pooled campaign hosted at Nuts Online to ship over 19,000 pounds of peanuts to CBS. Other efforts acquired over $9,000 to publish full page advertisements in Variety (National Edition) and The Hollywood Reporter for Tuesday, May 29th. This is expected to become the largest ever fan campaign to bring a television show back from cancellation” (From Slashdot).

TiVo has tried to combat this with their banner advertisements during fast forwarding, and others are trying to get the broadcast flag standard to be legally adopted. Both these approaches are not having much success, and advertisers are not happy. There needs to be a better way to measure ratings and keep advertisers happy with the increasing number of DVR users.

TV networks are now hosting their hit TV shows on their websites, which does increase advertising revenue, but not as much as they would like. Though one good idea these sites are instituting is the way people view their shows online with advertising. Its not a new idea, but is a successful one. The shows are available anytime a viewer wants, but the whole show won’t load at once, it will come in pieces with advertising thrown in the middle and can’t be skipped. These ads are different though, they are more intuitive and not like your typical commercial. I actually prefer watching these ads, and I believe they need to be adopted into the normal TV viewing experience.

Ratings can be measured in this way. They are converted into the web version which are called unique visitors. This might not be as accurate, but it consists of a much larger audience and would be optimal if it could be adopted to mainstream TV viewing.

Here in lies the problem. These online shows are on demand and not recorded. Therefore it takes more bandwidth then their is available to bring this to the masses of living rooms around the country. We are only now bringing fiber technology to peoples homes, which is fast enough to carry HD video signals to your home without the lag. The problem is that the installation of fiber optics is not going fast enough to keep up with the the demand of this new TV viewing experience. Actually 90% of the country was supposed to be fiber optic by now, but the telecommunications industry took the government subsidized money that was given to them in the mid 90s and used it at their own pleasure instead of putting it towards fiber to the home as it was intended.

With that said, what are your views of this problem? Do you think many more shows will go the way of Jericho if something is not done? What ideas do you have that could help the situation. Leave your thoughts and complaints in the comments.