NBC Sunday Night Football: America's Most DVR-Proof TV Show

The current issue of Entertainment Weekly has a roundup of the ratings for every single show on network television in the 2007-08 TV season. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about TV ratings that NBC's Sunday night NFL games did very well, losing in the ratings only to American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, House and CSI.

But Entertainment Weekly goes beyond just the ratings and reveals something fascinating about why the NFL is such a dominant force in American television. The complete list also includes the portion of viewers of each show who watched the show on their DVRs, and it turns out that just 1% of Sunday Night Football viewers watched on DVR, the lowest percentage of any show on TV. (The rates for other top shows were 9% for CSI, 6-7% for different versions of Dancing, 12-13% for different versions of Idol, 13% for Desperate Housewives and 15% for House.)

What that means, from the network's point of view, is that advertisers are more likely to get their commercials seen on NFL games than they are on other shows, because DVR users usually skip past commercials. And that's yet another reason that the NFL is the single most valuable content provider in American television.