How We Watch

James Poniewozik notes at his Time blog that the big theme of the upfronts was the shifting audience - with DVRs and on-line viewing skewing the numbers something awful. So he asks his readers to fill in this little questionnaire about viewing habits. So:

• Watch live: CSI: Miami, Criminal Minds, The Office, Lost.
• Watch the same night, but delayed enough to skip the ads: How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, 30 Rock
• Watch within a night or two: Scrubs, House
• Pile up on my TiVo and watch eventually: Battlestar Galactica, The Simpsons, Rules of Engagement, Sarah Conner: The Terminator Chronicles
• Download and watch on the subway: None (although when I had a DVR that let me burn DVDs I watched The Sopranos and Big Love this way).
• TiNo (Tim Goodman's coinage for recording but pretty much never watching): None.

I find it at least a little interesting how some habits are driven out of necessity - I let BSG pile up because the wife doesn't watch. We watch shows the same night on delay, not specifically to avoid ads, but because we start watching after the kids go down. Nonetheless, the overall big question - how is all this going to affect TV in the next 5-10 years, given that is an ad-driven medium - is very interesting.

Until Whenever