Time-shift TV won't cut amount of live TV, ad exposure

Time-shift television, a technology that allows people to watch TV shows they missed without presetting devices to record content, may not reduce the amount of time people spend watching live TV and the advertisements on the shows, suggests new research.

The findings, published in the journal Management Science, showed that people with time-shift TV watched slightly more TV overall than they did before having the technology; they did not watch less live TV, and they did not watch fewer advertisements.

The results stated that on average, having access to the premium channels with time-shift TV increased households' total consumption of TV through viewership of both live and previously aired programmes.

Having time-shift technology in fact boosted the concentration of total TV viewership because viewers used the technology disproportionately more to watch popular programmes.