Majority of consumers DVR live sports
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 07 December 2016

Contrary to conventional wisdom, consumers often DVR live sports to watch later, according to a new survey from Thuuz Sports.

In fact, the vast majority of pay-TV subscribers with DVRs – about 84.3% – use them to record sports, with 84% of those sports DVR users doing so several times a month.

The reasons for this are myriad: 75% said they use the DVR as a back-up when they can’t watch the game live, 58% use it as a back-up when they might miss the start of a contest, and 58% like to skip ads.

“Sports are best viewed live, but this survey highlights the fact that most fans with DVRs regularly use them to customise their sports viewing in a near-live fashion,” said Brian Ring, principal of Ring Digital, which partnered with Thuuz*on the survey. “Indeed, our dataset provides strong evidence that a multi-billion-dollar opportunity exists for TV providers and sports networks to super-serve this user behaviour, creating a better TV bundle.”

To that latter point, the study showed that 70.1% of sports fans would be ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ interested in the concept of a service that automatically curates and personalises highlights from recently recorded games, and that they would expect to pay an average of $11.74 per month for such a service. About 65% said they would expect to pay more than $10 per month.

“Thuuz is all about enhancing fan experiences for games and highlights through metadata indicating the best moment to tune-in, which can also be extended to automatically assemble personalised playlists for each subscriber,” said Warren Packard, CEO of Thuuz Sports. “These survey results strengthen our commitment to personalised, real-time sports video highlights as a growth strategy for TV operators, sports networks, leagues and teams.”