November 24, 2008

NEW YORK – Figuring out a prime-time schedule is usually one of CW network chief Dawn Ostroff's most important duties. Never, however, has it seemed to matter less.

The promise inherent in digital video recorders — that viewers can be in control of their own TV schedules — is rapidly being fulfilled this fall, and the business is changing around it. Nearly 30 percent of the nation's TV homes have at least one.

Nowhere is the impact more apparent than at the CW, where recording the shows and watching them later account for nearly 17 percent of the network's viewership over a one-week period. Two years ago, it was less than 5 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The time-shifting is more dramatic for individual shows. The CW even had a week where the audience of 18-to-34-year-old women for "90210" increased by a stunning 79 percent over the live broadcast.

Viewing for ABC, CBS and NBC programs are all more than 10 percent time-shifted now, too. Fox's programming is only 8 percent time-shifted this fall, in large part because it has shown postseason baseball, which very few people watch later.

"More and more people are changing the way they consume television," said Alan Wurtzel, NBC's chief research executive. "In the next few years, we will rewrite all the rules."

The most time-shifted show is NBC's "The Office," where 28 percent of its audience watched it sometime other than Thursdays at 9 p.m, Nielsen said. Action shows and serialized dramas, like "Fringe," "Heroes" and "Grey's Anatomy," have big time-shifted audiences. Not surprisingly, young people are the quickest to adapt to new technology.