TiVo Is Watching When You Don’t Watch, and It Tattles

AS the advertising and television industries debate how to measure viewers of shows watched on digital video recorders, the pioneering maker of the recorders, TiVo, is getting into the argument. It is starting a research division to sell data about how its 4.4 million users watch commercials — or, more often, skip them.

The service is based on an analysis of the second-by-second viewing patterns of a nightly sample of 20,000 TiVo users, whose recorders report back to TiVo on what was watched and when.

On average, TiVo has found that its users spend nearly half of their television time watching programs recorded earlier. And viewers of those recorded shows skip about 70 percent of the commercials, said Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president for audience research.

But TiVo says that at a more detailed level there are wide variations in the numbers. The new research service, which is intended mainly for advertisers, could help them understand how to get more people to watch recorded commercials, like changing the content of ads or running them during certain kinds of programming.

For example, one study for a consumer packaged goods company, which Mr. Juenger declined to identify, found that commercials featuring animal characters, when shown on animal-related programs, were skipped less often than usual.

Some advertising executives said they were excited at the prospect of having access to data from TiVo recorders, which can offer some details that are not captured in the industry’s standard ratings by Nielsen Media Research.

“We are still in the early stages of what works and what doesn’t work with video recorders,” said Greg Johnson, executive director of the Interpublic Group’s emerging-media lab. “Getting better data will help marketers make better decisions.”

About 8 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s 110 million television households have digital video recorders, and the number is growing rapidly as cable and satellite companies offer the devices. TiVo, however, has found it hard to expand because people buying a TiVo recorder need to connect it to a cable or satellite box, which can be a complex process.

Indeed, TiVo’s limited user base makes some agencies turn up their noses at the new offering.

“TiVo doing a small thing here, or someone else doing a small thing there, doesn’t give us a better and more broad form of measurement,” said Andrew McLean, the chief operating officer of MediaEdge:CIA, a unit of the WPP Group.

The research service is part of an effort by Thomas S. Rogers, TiVo’s chief executive, to build revenue and also to try to repair relations with marketers, which have been angry about its role in helping viewers avoid advertising.

Mr. Rogers said he hoped that TiVo’s new research would help advertisers bargain for better deals from networks. “All this money has changed hands in the TV advertising business, when there has not been any data given by the rating agencies about the watching of advertisements,” he said.

For now, TiVo will not be able to tell advertisers anything about the demographics of the audience it measures. The privacy policy of the service allows it to gather data about viewing habits, but not any personal information. Mr. Juenger said TiVo hoped to find a way to change that by the end of the year.

Nielsen has started to measure how video recorders are used, but it has been caught in a fight between the networks and advertisers about how to classify the data it gathers.

Nielsen publishes three versions of its program ratings: how many people watched a program when it was originally broadcast, how many watched it within one day and how many within a week.

In the upfront negotiations over advertising rates this spring, major ad agencies refused to use these new measures as a basis for buying commercials, arguing that most recorded advertisements are skipped. So for the next season, Nielsen will measure the number of people who actually have their set on during the commercials. (Nielsen cannot measure whether viewers leave the room, just whether the commercials are played.)

At the insistence of the networks, the company will report the average audience for all of the commercials in a program. While some advertisers want audience information broken out second by second, the networks argue that this level of detail is unreliable using the Nielsen system, which largely relies on meters that detect audio tones embedded in shows.

In any case, the networks hope that these commercial ratings will help them get credit for the people who do see recorded commercials.

“Advertisers don’t want to count people in playback mode at all because they assume they are all fast-forwarding through the commercials,” said David F. Poltrack, executive vice president for research and planning at CBS. “We say that not everybody is fast-forwarding.”