There are only 3.5 million houses in the country equipped with digital video recording devices, but those devices represent the single scariest thing to broadcasters.
   Which may explain why viewers are seeing more widgets and gizmos on their TV screens.
   Last week, Nielsen Media Research said it would begin tracking DVR households, just as TiVo was predicting 1.5 million new customers to join before next January. 
   In anticipation, the networks are making it increasingly difficult to avoid their advertisements via DVR by working them into programming content. Call them screen mice, such as that little NBC peacock that pops into the corner of the screen during “Friends" to promote an upcoming episode of “ER.” 
   A new study from PhaseOne Communications finds that the time used for such in-program promotion has grown from nearly non-existent to, well, menace levels.
   When the New York consultancy company did a clutter study in 2000, the levels of such promotions were so low that they didn’t bother keeping numbers.
   PhaseOne’s latest clutter survey, taken during fourth-quarter 2003, finds that the three networks now average nearly 31 seconds of promotion during nightly primetime programming.
   DVRs are not the only reason for the surge, but they definitely are feeding it.
   “We studied the advertising environment, and there are generally more ads during the night. We suspect that networks and marketers are looking for new ways to break through and compete with the clutter,” says PhaseOne senior vice president and director of analysis Terry Villines.
   “Some of that is in preparation for the even greater adoption of TiVo than we’ve already seen. Networks want their ads more easily seen – they know [TiVo users] fast-forward past commercials.”
   The study broke down in-program promotion, defined as commercials and promotions seen or heard during the content of a show (not counting credits unless they show original material), into three groups.
   Pop-up promos, or supers, are on-screen graphics that appear during programming to promote another show. NBC, ABC and Fox all use these devices, with NBC leading the way with an average nine used per programming block. ABC and Fox both averaged four.
   CBS did not use any supers, but did tie for the highest occurrence of host promos, in which the host or anchor of a show promotes another program on the network, such as “60 Minutes” promoting an upcoming “60 Minutes II.” This is the only type of in-program promotion used by CBS, which averaged two instances along with Fox.
  ABC was the only network besides Fox local stations (measured because Fox’s schedule ends at 10 compared to the other networks’ 11) to use a pop-up corporate logo. For example, a tagline that appears telling viewers that a program is being presented in high definition may have a Zenith logo alongside it. ABC averaged two of these.
   “In 2000 we thought we’d seen the limit on clutter, but when we re-did the study, we found the environment had an 8 percent increase in the number of ads in a three-year period, and we began to develop the theory that consumers probably expect some level of advertising during the night,” Villines says.
   Eighty-eight percent of in-program promotions were for network shows. Fox and ABC combined for the 12 percent of in-program corporate advertising.
   But just because the ads are becoming more common doesn’t mean viewers are absorbing them. And thus, like rich media has done for pop-ups online, networks seem to be branching out in their presentations.
   “These ads are probably very much the same as the old banner ads on the internet,” Villines says. “You train yourself not to pay attention to them. This is more just an observation, since it’s not included in the study, but since we did the study last quarter, I’ve noticed even more creative types of pop-ups that include more motion action than what I noticed last quarter.
   “If people are beginning to screen them out, the networks want to do whatever they can to make them as noticeable as the current technology allows.”