Anthony Crupi

In what may be the most cogent argument for the adoption of the C7 ratings currency, TiVo Research revealed that broadcasters beholden to the dated C3 metric are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in ad sales revenue on the table.

According to TiVo’s analysis of its top 10 “Season Pass” broadcast series (a designation reserved for the shows that subscribers most commonly flag for automatic, full-season recording), there is an average lift of 8.2 percent in overall deliveries when four days of playback are added to the C3 data. As that increase is not compensated under the current metric, this translates to an overall loss of $87.8 million in ad sales for those 10 programs. (As the data was generated in a second-by-second analysis of TiVo subscriber behaviors, the numbers were not broken down by the relevant demographics.)

While a shift from C3 to C7 doesn’t proportionately move the ratings needle for Fox’s American Idol, which is largely watched in real time, the elevated cost of buying time in the show translates into the most amount of viewing that remains uncompensated. Per TiVo, when the 4.1 percent boost in deliveries is brought to bear on the average unit cost for the Wednesday and Thursday night Idol ($319,565 a pop), it all adds up to $14.4 million in wasted opportunities.