Can PVRs Kill TV Spots?
By Robyn Greenspan September 22, 2003 Television commercials may become the casualty of personal video recorder (PVR) penetration, the Yankee Group finds, but the ad’s demise may not come until mid-to-late 2005 when more than 10 million subscribe to the digital technology. PVRs sometimes known as DVRs (digital video recorders) are similar to VCRs (video cassette recorders) in the sense that they both record, rewind, stop, fast-forward and pause, but a PVR records to a hard drive instead of a tape. PVRs like TiVo will search out your favorite programs to record have higher functionality than VCRs, allowing you to pause a live broadcast, record more to disk, and use an interactive interface to customize the viewing experience. Often, viewers eliminate TV commercials with a touch of a button, and ReplayTV, a PVR vendor, has created an “ad-skip” feature on their remote controls. Adi Kishore, Yankee Group Media & Entertainment Strategies analyst, estimates that by 2007, nearly one-fifth of
