On Sundays, the DVR Runneth Over
JoJo Whilden/HBO
“Girls,” with Lena Dunham,
left, and Allison Williams, is broadcast Sunday nights on HBO. With more
good shows on TV than time and digital video recorders can easily
accommodate, viewers are planning their menus carefully.
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: April 19, 2012
LIKE a lot of television fans, Kelly Foster had a problem last Sunday.
Too much TV — and not enough time to watch or hard drive space to record
it all.
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Michael Yarish/AMC
“Mad Men,” with Jessica Paré and Jon Hamm, is shown on Sunday night on AMC.
So it was a two-DVR day for Ms. Foster, 46, an event producer in New
York. The digital video recorder in her living room taped “The Good
Wife” on CBS, while she watched the broadcasts of “Nurse Jackie” on Showtime and “Girls” on HBO;
meanwhile, the DVR in her bedroom backed up “Oprah’s Next Chapter” on
OWN and “Mad Men” on AMC. By Thursday, she still hadn’t caught up with
“Mad Men.” And she’s practically dreading “Veep,” an HBO sitcom that has
its premiere on Sunday.
“Obviously the various networks think this is the best time to capture
the viewers’ attention, and Sunday nights are really the only night I
watch ‘appointment’ TV,” she said. “But at some point it’s just too
much!”
These are the predicaments of “the 43 percent”: the proportion of
households in the United States with DVRs: minor and silly-sounding,
yes, but frustrating for viewers who feel they have to assemble their
own menu of time-shifted TV.
Right now Sundays are the hardest to piece together. The pileup of
must-see shows on Sunday seems to have hit a breaking point this spring,
with the return of “Mad Men,” the return of “Game of Thrones” to HBO,
and the start of “Girls” and “Veep.” On the same evening, there are the
new dramas “GCB” on ABC and “The Client List” on Lifetime, among others.
“That whirring sound you’re hearing in the background is your DVR crashing,” the media trade magazine Adweek declared in a recent article on the long list of quality Sunday shows.
Sure enough, complaints about too much of a good thing popped up on the
Web last weekend, as viewers contemplated which shows to save and which
to sacrifice. Even the best DVRs typically allow only two shows to be
recorded at the same time. And dramas like “Mad Men” regularly run a few
minutes past the top of the hour, creating havoc with DVR programming.
Some viewers wind up watching their third- or fourth-string show via
cable’s video-on-demand feature or Hulu,
the online streaming Web site. (Those services can be frustrating,
however, because episodes sometimes don’t appear for hours or days after
their original telecasts.) And sometimes shows are skipped altogether.
“I think the current crop of shows on Sunday night is the biggest glut
of great TV that I can remember,” said Gary Lee Webster, 62, a radio
announcer in Fort Scott, Kan. Lately he’s had to bypass “Family Guy” on
Fox in favor of dramas like “The Killing” on AMC and the sitcom “The Big
C” on Showtime. It wasn’t as much of a problem last fall, since
networks tend to avoid putting too many big shows up against Sunday
night football games.
Cable and broadcast programmers take the end of the weekend so seriously
because the percentage of households watching television is higher on
Sunday night than any other night of the week. So the potential audience
for new and returning shows is bigger than on other nights.
HBO helped to form the Sunday night strategy with shows like “The
Sopranos” over a decade ago. (That network already had a Saturday night
film franchise, so it wanted to seize the second half of the weekend by
adding an original show.) Now even low-rated cable channels like OWN,
run by Oprah Winfrey, try to stake out Sunday night turf. Ms. Winfrey’s
show “Oprah’s Next Chapter” has gained traction on Sundays at 9, though
the audience size varies from week to week.
Underlying the Sunday pileup are two trends: time-shifting, on one side,
and the tendency to chat about shows online in real time, on the other.
Katie Perry, 25, a marketing manager in New York City, said the
conflicts between her favorite Sunday shows created her own “personal
Bermuda Triangle.” She typically watches “Celebrity Apprentice” at 9
p.m. but stops halfway through so she doesn’t miss “Mad Men.”
“Draper always wins,” she said.
Some viewers ask themselves: Which Sunday shows are most likely to come
up in conversation at work or while surfing the Web on Monday?
Conversely, which ones can wait a few days on the DVR?
Last weekend Meredith Dropkin, 41, a public relations executive in
Syracuse, picked “Mad Men” over the premiere of “Girls,” but queued up
“Girls” on the DVR. Forgoing sleep, she then squeezed in two others —
“The Good Wife” and “Chopped” on the Food Network.
“I went to work tired, but ready for the water cooler,” she said by e-mail.
By the time the DVRs have cooled down on Monday mornings, the most
popular Sunday shows typically include “The Good Wife,” “60 Minutes” and
“The Amazing Race” on CBS; “Harry’s Law” and “The Apprentice” on NBC;
and that stalwart “America’s Funniest Home Videos” on ABC, according to
the overnight Nielsen ratings. But broadcasters and cable channels alike
keep a close eye on the ever-growing amount of viewing that happens
after those initial ratings results come in.
“Sunday night, though synonymous with HBO original series, is simply the
starting line for us,” said Richard Plepler, a co-president of HBO. “We
often generate over two-thirds of our viewing on other platforms,”
including cable video on demand and HBO Go, the channel’s streaming
service.
Those other platforms help viewers assemble their menu of shows. Mr.
Webster has noticed that the cable channels repeat their original shows
an hour or two later, so he sometimes rearranges his DVR schedule
accordingly.
“Sunday is the night you stock up your DVR for the week,” the Time magazine television critic James Poniewozik mused on Twitter last weekend. “It is the Costco of television.” end quote from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/arts/television/on-sundays-the-dvr-runnethover.html?google_editors_picks=true
I solved this problem by buying a Tivo Elite which has 4 recording heads, so four programs can be recorded at the same time on different stations. Though it costs around 500 dollars so that is pretty steep and there is a 20 a month service charge, you can buy unlimited service for about another 500 dollars so when you add this in your whole system pays for itself in about 2 years. So, if it lasts 5 years or more you have free service that lasts as long as the Tivo does. So, if your Tivo Elite lasts just 2 years it has paid for itself. A TIVO Elite will hold 1000 hours of regular TV Programs or 300 hours of HD programming. I only record HD now and play it on my large flatscreen in the living room. I had a 2 head DVR before this with Comcast that I rented monthly. But because there are now 4 adults over 16 in my household we needed the extra capacity so everyone's programs got recorded and stored. So, far I have never been able to record more than about 46% of capacity even recording only HD. Also, the more you record the more difficult it becomes to find what you record because you might have over 100 or more things recorded. So, I try to delete something after enough of us have seen it so it is therefore less confusing to find stuff you want to see that is recorded. Another feature I really like about the TIVO is that if you accidentally delete something you didn't mean to there is a "Recently deleted" heading so you can go in and restore something if you realize you deleted the wrong thing or someone asks for something you recently deleted and gets angry. So, you just reinstall it in your main bank of shows.
A DVR is basically a computer with multiple hard drives the way I understand it and in this case 4 hard drives that is specifically designed for recording regular and high definition video. Another thing the TIVO does is take you to Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and a few others. However, I prefer using my little Roku for that which cost me only 50 bucks for streaming all these sites to my large flatscreen because it is less complicated to use. The one I have is purple and reminds me a lot of a purple hockey puck because it is so small and space saving.
A DVR is basically a computer with multiple hard drives the way I understand it and in this case 4 hard drives that is specifically designed for recording regular and high definition video. Another thing the TIVO does is take you to Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and a few others. However, I prefer using my little Roku for that which cost me only 50 bucks for streaming all these sites to my large flatscreen because it is less complicated to use. The one I have is purple and reminds me a lot of a purple hockey puck because it is so small and space saving.
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