Television: It’s still a passive activity

From The New York Times:

DVR, Once TV’s Mortal Foe, Helps Ratings
By BILL CARTER
Published: November 1, 2009
In what may seem a media business version of the Stockholm syndrome, television network executives have fallen in love with a former tormentor: the digital video recorder … more people seem content to sit through the commercials than networks once thought.

… The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate*, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.

“It’s still a passive activity,” he said.

I’ve yakked and yakked about passive and active activities and advertising.  A few years ago it was about magazines (and television):

Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

This isn’t ‘down time’ (that would be sleeping), but nourishing your psyche by absorbing and not actively being involved …

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* It was 2005 when I first pulled a quote from Brad Adgate:

Over 50 and Out of Favor: by Meg James, LA Times

Another one:

Where’s the TV for us?