61% of those who responded said they were using time-shifting technologies more
than one year ago. Last season, the Tuesday edition of "American Idol" was the most-time-shifted show on television, drawing an additional 5.6 million total viewers per episode.
An earlier report by Steve Sternberg, written for Baseline, a NYTimes company,
said there's a perception that DVR users are generally a young bunch, in their 20s and 30s, and that's why the median age for time-shifted viewing is a decade younger than the live viewing age. But
actually the heaviest DVR users are ages 50-64.
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Thus it's more a case of who's not time-shifting that accounts for the lower median age. People over age 65 do very little time-shifting, but they do a lot of live TV watching, and so time-shifted viewership tends to be younger because it does not have that group pushing the median age up.