An average of 46% of viewing of “The Jay Leno Show” by TiVo subscribers is time-shifted, TiVo reported. That’s down from 70% time-shifted viewing for the NBC programs that ran last season in the 10-11 pm ET slot.
“Depending on who you ask, NBC’s glass is either half full or half empty,” said Todd Juenger, Vice President & General Manager, TiVo Audience Research & Measurement. “While Leno is succeeding in reducing the amount of time-shifted viewing for NBC’s 10pm timeslot, he certainly isn’t ‘TiVo-proof’ as nearly 50% of viewing is still time-shifted. Moreover, those timeshifted viewers are nearly twice as likely to watch within one hour, displacing NBC’s 11pm timeslot.” That, of course, is local news, followed by “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”
TiVo users represent only a small portion of the total TV viewer universe, so there’s no way yet to know how representative the sample is for measuring Leno time-shifting. Here is what the TiVo number crunching found:
The average percentage of time-shifted viewing for “The Jay Leno Show” was 46% thus far, after two weeks on the air, with 20% time-shifted within one hour. That compared to 70% time-shifted/13% within one hour for the programming NBC ran last season, 62%/15% for ABC last season in the 10-11 hour and 68%/13% for CBS. Fox does not program the time slot.
Head-to-head for the two weeks of the Leno show, the TiVo time-shifting stats were 63%/18% for ABC and 65%/16% for CBS.
RBR-TVBR observation: Our take? Unless Leno has on a guest you really, really want to see, why would you record the show? There will be another one to watch tomorrow.
The TiVo numbers seem bear that out. There’s less time-shifted playback of Leno than of the dramas on the other networks and a much larger portion of it takes place within an hour. That would indicate that people watching Leno are being interrupted by a phone call or something else that takes them away from watching the show, so they catch up before they go to bed.
Not so many people are setting their DVRs to record every Leno show so they can watch all five hours each week at their leisure. Nor would you expect them to.
