The Changing Richness of DVR Data

I have been exploring the current state of the DVR and the kind of behavioral data that could be captured from it. There is an article in today's Ad Age: Ad Skipping? Just Wait. It's Going to Get Worse, which speaks to recent legal rulings and how they might cause the broader the use of DVRs. And also with regard to how ads can be skipped.

I was an early user of the Tivo and was very enthusiastic about it until a lightning surge disabled mine. I then went to Time Warner's box. Recently they downloaded a new 'improved' operating system that would allow stronger interaction, but also caused most every simple function to work at half speed. They have also removed the ability to do 'large jumps' when doing a fast forward. So I cannot get to the middle of a movie quickly.

I would imagine that kind of feature change alone would alter much of their behavioral click stream data. Classic example of a change in context invalidating much historic data. About 23% of US homes now have DVRs and and it is expected that this will rise to 37% by 2012.