For Broadcast February 13, 2008

The extent of the cudgelling of traditional TV advertising by the PVR has been debated ad nauseam: is the PVR the death of the 30-second spot? The jury is still out, but some new facts about the power of time-shifted viewing make for interesting reading.

Sky's Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, which began airing in January, brought in a respectable 974,000 viewers to the live broadcast transmission of episode one. But within two weeks of airing on Sky One, another 257,000 more viewers had seen the episode on Sky's PVRs and another 84,000 had seen it on Sky Anytime, the TV service where programmes are "pushed" to newer Sky boxes overnight for viewing later.

Taken together, an extra third of the total original audience watched Mr Kemp with the troops on a delayed service. And that doesn't take into account the 363,000 viewers who watched the show on Sky Two or the 38,000 who watched it on Sky's HD service or the 458,000 who watched repeats on Sky One. In all, 2.17 million watched the episode, but less than half of them watched it on the original Sky One live broadcast.

All broadcasters know the power of repeats and of plus-one channels. But time-shifting based on the viewer's choice of when to watch is something else again. According to Sky research, homes with a Sky PVR spend 17% of their time viewing time-shifted programmes.

This may not sound like a lot until you put it up against the viewing of linear channels in Sky+ homes. ITV1 had the biggest share of viewing in Sky + homes from October to December at 13.5% share. And the popularity of the Sky Anytime push VoD service in the 1.2 million Sky homes that have used it is also significant: there were 5 million Anytime views in December alone across a variety of programmes. Viewing behaviour is shifting and the next generation of TV viewers, weaned on the internet where everything is on-demand, will be even more sophisticated and promiscuous in how they choose to view content. TV viewing on-demand is here to stay and no prizes for guessing just how important it is to the future of all broadcasters.