Well, there’s a shock.

 A new Nielsen Media survey shows younger viewers are more likely to use digital video recorders or the Internet to catch up on shows they missed than those over 55.

I hope no one paid too much for that insight. The numbers show those under 35 are slightly more likely (37%) to watch a show on a DVR than those ages 35 to 54 (30%) but significantly more likely to catch up on the Internet (16%) than their elders (5%).

The real dropoff in technology usage comes at age 55. Those over that age are much more likely to wait for a rerun (35%) or just watch the next show (20%) than to use a DVR (18%).

None of this is surprising, but it does speak to the need for video service providers to make their technologies easier to use. I suspect older viewers would be happy to watch their shows on their own time, if they could only figure out how. There is a lot of disposable income sitting in the pockets of these older viewers, and for all the focus on the youth market, someone should be smart enough to tap that money pit.

It’s clear there’s a battle brewing over whether service providers can legally filter content, whether it is to prevent piracy, protect applications such as voice and video or keep peer-to-peer traffic from swamping the network. There are multiple approaches to doing this today and more on the way.

Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Pictures Association of America told UBS’s 35th annual Global Media and Communications Conference that his organization is working directly with ISPs and with its own technical arm, Movie Labs, to develop and deploy technology that can detect illegal usage of copyright-protected material. Glickman singled out AT&T as one company with whom the MPAA is working, but also said other ISPs are on the list.

“My prediction is the ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this – they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that content is being properly protected,” Glickman said.

Understandably, this has some folks’ shorts in a twist. You can read what Broadband Reports and Ars Technia said.

What most of the reports of Glickman’s speech failed to pick up on, however, were the other ways in which the MPAA is working to stop piracy of copyrighted content. One of those is education, he said – working with schools to explain to a tech-savvy generation why stealing content is a bad idea.

And another is working with its members to “find new ways to deliver content at reasonable prices,” Glickman said. That is especially important for younger viewers, he added, who are looking to get content in new forms other than at the movie theater or on traditional TV.

To the extent the MPAA and content distributors develop a good business model for achieving that latter goal, they could go a long way to address casual piracy by otherwise law-abiding citizens. And that’s something to which no one can object.