lazy is as lazy does

for many years, i resisted getting tivo. the first person i knew who had one was dumb as a box of hammers and i couldn't take seriously anything that came out of his empty head. he also couldn't articulate how it worked. moreso, after a career of working nights, i'd simply lost the habit of prime-time tv. like i missed the entire seinfeld era. (no loss, that kind of new yorky navel-gazing doesn't amuse here, but lots of episodes became familiar cultural references. as a restaurant person, how i envied the soup nazi! but when customers would make a crack, assuming i simply MUST have seen such-and-such an episode, my lack of recognition registered like i was some sort of bone-in-the-nose savage reshly emerged from the amazon rainforest.)

fast-forward and the owner is adamant tivo will change my world, and there will be no getting around ordering the box.

my concern that i'd start watching too much mindless tv was unfounded, because the only stuff on there was what i had asked it to store. no time wasted surfing channels looking for a show of interest. brilliant! (except early in its personal learning curve. the owner had included lots of soccer in the to-do list, so tivo helpfully picked up lots of telemundo soaps, thinking i was latin.)

much like tv was going to kill radio, and vcrs kill the movies, network honchos gnashed their teeth that dvrs would spell certain boob-tube doom.

with everything based on ad dollars and that coveted demographic of 18-49 year olds, the suits decided on what, even to me, seemed a flawed model of counting eyeballs. they only tracked same day views and yeah, it didn't look great. don't know who had a light-bulb moment, but two years ago nielsen switched to a plus-3 method. same day, plus the 3 days after for ad views. personally, i nearly never watch programs on the same day, and neither does anybody i know. duh. this has dramatically increased ratings from some shows thought to be laggards, some clicking up more than 20%, so there is now a little more sunshine in hollywood.

the biggest surprise? from today's ny times:

"According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content? The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.

“It’s still a passive activity,” he said."

even with remote controls and only a simple button push to avoid the chevy tahoe/bud light-lime nonsense, most people are simply too lazy to bother, lol.