Dollhouse

I’m doing different cuts of the DVR data this week (actually, the data is for the week of 3/23-3/29, I didn’t see it until Thursday afternoon, sorry for the delays). We probably won’t move to this sort of reporting on a regular basis. This takes some time, there isn’t huge interest in it, and I’m not sure it’s what people really want to see.

However, I’m slicing this data in the ways I think it actually does mean anything, rather than the stuff people seem to want to see which while not meaningful, sometimes makes people happy. So, we’ll probably go back to happy next week.

We normally look at the shows with the most absolute DVR viewing, and the shows with the biggest viewing increases due to DVR viewing. That latter table isn’t particularly meaningful to anything, and while we don’t believe DVR viewing in general is terribly meaningful to show’s renewal prospects, we can say with great certainty that a high percentage viewing increase due to DVR viewing isn’t meaningful at all to most shows because typically the shows with the greatest increases have low overall viewing. There are exceptions, but they are for The Office which had 34% of its viewing on DVR and wound up with over 10 million viewers, and not Dollhouse, which had 29% of its viewing, but only wound up with 4.8 million total viewers.

DVR viewing is really only meaningful to the degree it changes the relative ranks of shows. The truth is, it still doesn’t change the relative ranks very much because with most shows, most people are watching LIVE. What I did in the first table below is list the shows with the highest LIVE+7 viewing totals. In other words, the regular weekly top 20, but when the full week of DVR viewing is factored in, rather than only the DVR viewing that happened on the same night.

I’ve included the live, live plus same day and live plus seven viewing numbers, as well as totaled the DVR viewing, but the first table is sorted by total viewing with DVR viewers factored in rather than the typical sorting that is sorted by the number of DVR viewers. Remember, nowhere else besides the DVR data do we ever post the Live viewing numbers. The overnight and regular weekly information is all Live+SD which includes a lot of the total DVR viewing. The same day DVR viewing ranges from about 30%-70% of the Live+7 DVR viewing depending on the show and the time slot.