• Reuters, Tuesday, August 17, 2010 11:21 PM

Time-shifted TV viewing has more than doubled over the past year and over 40 percent of Americans now make plans to record their favorite shows and watch them later, according to a survey released on Tuesday, reports Reuters. More than two-thirds of viewers have watched prime-time television series through video on demand, digital video recorders and the Internet, the survey conducted for the No. 1 U.S. cable TV operator Comcast Corp found.

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.

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.

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