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I own a Digital Video Recorder (DVR), the little black box that has television owners smiling and ABC frowning. With one provider calling the device "the complete home entertainment experience," it allows me to record my favorite television programs while I'm away from home or busy with the writing of an article like this. What I really enjoy with my DVR, however, is the ability to fast-forward my way through annoying commercials, condensing a 60-minute program to what it really is...48-minutes of entertainment with 12-annoying minutes of hard and soft sell interspersed between the program. Industry officials now estimate that 10% of American households now own a DVR, meaning that up to 10% of television commercials are potentially never viewed. For advertisers who pay big bucks to television companies such as ABC for commercial time on hit programs such as "Desperate Housewives," "Lost," and "Grey's Anatomy," that's money going down a consumer black hole.

How much? ABC's revenue for its prime time commercial bookings recently hit $2.3 billion, but doing a worse case scenario of 10% of TV viewers skipping commercials with their DVR means up to $230 million of these ad dollars being potentially wasted. Advertisers are exploring alternative avenues for their dollars, and that has ABC scared.

This fast-forwarding ability has Mike Shaw, president of advertising sales at ABC Television Network, looking for a way to get DVR providers such as TiVo and its competitors to disable this consumer-prized feature. To listen to Shaw, however, DVR customers wouldn't mind losing sitting through 12-minutes of commercials that they now zap away with the push of a button. "I'm not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials," Shaw recently told Media Daily News, assuming that he said this with a straight face. Of course, if the ability to skip television commercials wasn't such as big concern to Shaw and ABC, why the discussion in the first place?

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