Research of television viewing behavior shows that there is a population of television users who tune the television to a particular channel but do not attentively watch the resulting broadcast. In a typical broadcast television system, this poses no additional loads on the system and does not incur additional cost for the content provider. In IPTV, however, these unattended content streams consume valuable bandwidth. A bandwidth management process for television content transmitted via Internet Protocol involves accepting a user designation of identified content as being content that will not be attentively viewed, or that will not be viewed at all during transmission, and reducing the bandwidth for the transmission of the designated content. One approach involves adjusting the video component of the transmitted content to reduce the bandwidth. Another approach involves recording the content to a DVR and automatically playing back the recorded content in a loop.