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Nielsen Will Measure TV ratings Among DVR Users
prostoalex writes "TV ratings publisher Nielsen is one company that got affected by the digital video recorder boom. With 7 million households recording TV shows and watching them on their own schedules, the concept of primetime changes, and the audience reporting is becoming skewed. So now Nielsen is launching a special program for DVR households, which would allow advertisers and TV executives to track the popularity of TV programs. Nielsen plans to distribute paper diaries among the households that use digital video recorder. Last time I did a Nielsen TV rating diary, they paid $5 a week."
I wonder if they'll ever start surveying torrent downloaders of tv shows... :)
My DirecTiVo asked me awhile ago if I wanted to participate. I don't mind sharing data on what TV I watch, and if it will report it automatically to help the shows I do enjoy be renewed and stay on the air, I think it's great. I've also done a radio diary once, it was a pain to keep track of. This will make the process a lot easier.
Nielsen cheerfully tells you what shows are watched, but won't tell you whether the audience kept the commercials on, or whether they muted them, skipped forward, or changed channels for 3 minutes.
Actually reporting what commercials are viewed to completion with sound-on would radically change televsion programming and advertising.
Remain calm! All is well!
Good thing it's just paper...
I can just lie about my pr0^H^H^H Trek watching.
Please, if you have a chance to sign up for these services, do so. And watch decent television. The sooner we can get the Reality TV craze off the air the better.
That they sent me the books with like $20 already inside.....
I never did complete them, but I always hoped they'd send more...:)
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
Reality television and the rest of the dreck suddenly makes a lot more sense if we're surveying people who are willing to spend the time writing down everything they watch for $5 a week.
I thought they used special boxes... I guess that only worked when the television landscape was more uniform.
I had regularly TiVo'd the live-action version of "The Tick". When it was canceled, I remembered reading news articles about the time it was on and how that killed it in the ratings. And I, a TiVo user, had absolutely NO CLUE when it was actually broadcast. None. All I knew was sometime during the week a new episode showed up on the Now Playing list, so when I had a bit of spare time, I watched it.
It's good that they're taking this step. Maybe some otherwise decent shows will show higher ratings now.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Yeah, Europe and Canada are nice ... :)
The Raven
Of course they are only likely to get information from people they can easily find, such as Tivo Customers and Sat TV companies who supply boxes with recording cabpabilities.
They will totally miss those using Mythtv ( http://www.mythtv.org/ ) or Freevo ( http://freevo.sourceforge.net/ ) or any other home brew solution.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nielsen plans to distribute paper diaries among the households that use digital video recorder.
I got a call from the Nielsen survey guy this morning (who in hell calls at 9:07 on a Saturday morning?) asking if we wanted to take part in the DVR survey. He specifically told me that with the DirecTivo, other than signing the permission for them to monitor the shows I watched/recorded, we wouldn't have to do anything.
With luck, this will result in better data than last time. Last year we were asked to fill out a paper diary, but my wife was hogging the television all week watching the baseball playoffs, so that skewed the results.
As a veteran time-shifter, I can only hope (but not hold my breath) that this service might convince broadcasters not to set aggressive limits on shifted viewing of "prime-time" shows. Once the media moguls understand that many viewers don't live life in 30-minute slots, they may be less likely to prevent time-shifting. On the other hand, I tend to time shift by weeks or months and I could see broadcasters setting the system to limit viewing to when 99% of viewers are watching with recording expiry times of only a few days.
Perhaps its time to stockup on pre-broadcast flag equipment.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Or are there rules against doing that with digital subscribers? I've assumed from the moment I got a DVR from Time Warner that if they wanted to they could track my viewing habits on a second-by-second basis, which beats the pants off any diary method.
And yes, Time Warner has by now caught on to how I like old movies and Star Trek...
You can't just "sign up" to be a Neilson "family". They have to contact you. They study demographics and then invite only certain qualifying households to participate.
The nice thing is, though, if you have any problems with your TVs or cable (etc) service, they will send someone over to repair or fix the problem. Anything to keep you watching... We got free service on our TVs that way.
A negative is that you start to become a slave to your TV, because you're "voting" for your favorite shows. Gotta stay home and watch, you know. I always wondered how many Neilson "families" would turn on the TV to certain shows/channels, even when no one was physically there in ffront of the TV to watch.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
My family has been participating in the Nielson rating system for 4 years now, and for as long as we've had it in our house, it records what channel our video recording units are tuned to when they are recording _as well as_ the tuner on the television itself.
So I'm not sure how this is anything new, exactly
Both of them
(only kidding!)
I have the Direct Tivo unit. It has absolutely changed the way my family watches tv. A few weeks ago we were offered to submit to be one the families for this. If you have Direct Tivo you may have the option at the main menu to join in also.
I always wondered what time warners' cable boxes were capable of sending back to TW. Does anyone know if they do any accounting of what's watched?
I don't see why TW would have to limit itself to DVR either, surely all digital boxes are capable.
Go ahead, sell accounting of my viewing habits--it's one of the few circumstances I welcome it. TW Prices here in WI are just beyond rediculous, it would be nice to get back to being just short of it. =P
Maybe the next Firefly equivalent won't get cancelled mid-season.
They should immediately cancel the few solidly-written, well-produced, well-acted shows currently on the air, continue producing thousands more hours of video dreck, those vacuous "series" that are as indistinguishable from each other as they are from white noise, and save themselves the worry about "ratings". It's what they really want to do anyways: TV executives seem continually surprised when people actually watch a quality production. It was predicted that Star Trek: The Next Generation would be too "highbrow" for the American audience and would fail miserably (this from some of the folks at Paramount, no less.) I mean, good heavens, a Shakespearean actor in the lead role? That it became a true hit series just blew them away, and that it was a hit among people of all walks of life, not just technojocks, nerds, and old-line Trekkies like me was especially shocking to them.
... what was the whole point of denaturing the education system in this country to the point where college graduates can't write in full sentences if not to produce a generation of mindless boobs incapable of appreciating a good literary reference or understand humor any less subtle than a Mack truck. Apparently that effort has failed because we do still appreciate a good show with high production values, on those rare occasions when we see one.
I mean
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Last time I did a Nielsen TV rating diary, they paid $5 a week.
I think we now know why TV caters to the lowest common denominator - $5/wk to give up my privacy and maybe manually fill out paper records of what I watch? Only people with nothing better to do are going to participate.
Just think, if someone were to hack the Nielson system, and instead of doing it to be a 1337 B1FF, no bragging rights, just subtle social engineering, we could get some good shows that last.
No more cancelation of a good show because the network can't schedule it well, no more reality show spam. Heck, we could get more pr0n on the air - the next Janet to whip out a tit will get crazy good numbers - fuck the FCC!
Hacking Nielson is better than being president, its like being the the guy who pulls the prez's strings, but without having to worry about a heart attack.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
ME: Boss, I'm slammed and I don't have time for any additional projects.
BOSS: Ok. Why don't you start writing down everything you're doing.
ME: And how is that going to save me any time?
People by DVRs because they want to save time. I doubt many will give that up for $5 after paying $200-500 to get it.
We recently got rid of the Niesen 'box' in the house I live in. We had four roommates when we started and they didn't really participate. We also know that we are in the two most difficult groups to market to (young women and 25-35 year-old men - yeah, you read that right!) - yet, Nielsen didn't really pay much attention us. I remember a friend who was also doing the survey and he said that they would call his house if they weren't sticking to pressing the 'confirm button' on what looked like antiquated gear (circa 1970's) - the box wold start flashing all of it's lights in a crazed pattern if the person who changed the TV channel didn't also confirm the change with the Nielsen remote. One day, the Nielsen rep came to their door with $50 asking them nicely to be more diligent participants. He did that every month for about three months since they kept it up. At the beginning, they gave us $200 and paid for the monthly land-line phone fee (for their equipment to talk to the local server.)
All of the experience made me curious. I wondered why it took them so long to switch to something more hi-tech. Cable boxes have been out since the 70's. I remember watching Jaws on HBO when I was a kid. We could have easily been a Nielsen house then if they got wise earlier. We didn't give them any useful information in the hopes they would come back to us and say 'it's so important for our statistic pool, here's another $200.'
They never did. We did get Dish with a DVR so that was a great reason to ditch the 'UFO' that roosted on our TV.
One thing they did do was break our VCR when they opened it up to install their sensing equipment. They replaced it with a new one, and then, when they packed up, they gave us a new one in the box because the technician needed to install it at a new house. I think it was refurbished because there was a sticker on the plastic inside that said 'Do Not Return To Retailer' - maybe Nielsen gets them in bulk.
We probably gave them more bunk data than usable. In the end, I guess I'd have to say that we came out on top because I didn't own a VCR with stereo inputs until they came along.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
I'm posting anon for this...
We volunteered for the measuring when it showed up in our DirecTivo Showcase a few weeks ago. Yesterday they called us during dinnertime and asked us questions for about 10 minutes about the makeup of our family.
We're happy to volunteer, if only to support the shows that we like to watch.
I was one of the TiVO users selected for this program, but since I work in advertising I was disqualified pretty early in the interview process. I was really looking forward to it too.
Stupid Cheap Guitars
wilco tango foxtrot?!?!
paper and pencil to document usage of a digital product
*Shakes head* Not that I have a better way of getting data from different DVR platforms, but it still reeks of ridiculous...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Nielsen/EDI just laid off a bunch of people that were collecting data by hand, because their competition was able to collect that same data electronically. Now, they move into the DVR market?
Sorry, they're already late to the party, and if they even think about forcing pen and paper, they've already doomed themselves.
This SO explains what tv companies are doing. Their data is based on people who are willing to fill out a paper jounrla of their viewing activities for 5 bucks a week - i.e. who are fucked up enough to sacrifice their priuvacy for a measly sum that is not even a compensation for the time spent on it, even when you discard any notions of surveillance.
Let's see, $5 buys how much of my spare time? Maybe 10 minutes if I am generous, less if it's a task I don't like.
They could NEVER convince me to hand them over my viewing habits unless I knew for certain it would be reliably anonymized. And even then they'd have to pay me more like $100-$400 a week, depending how much effort it is!
$5/week, I haven't laughed this much in quite a while.
perhaps this may give people a better portrail of g4techtv ratings and stop cancelling shows and firing show hosts like the screensavers.
my blog
Many Direct TV users have a permanent phone connection, primarily for ordering Pay Per View. But, it could also phone home time spent on each channel, at regular intervals. I've often wondered why this hasn't been done (if it isn't already being done).
I thought that tivo was already doing this.
wouldn't it be easier to just pay tivo to forward their database to nielsen?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
They're all doing Reality TV. Trading Spaces, He's a Lady, Junkyard Wars, cooking shows of all sorts, dating shows of all sorts... Junkyard Wars is really good, Trading Spaces is decent. Most of it is reprehensible.
You just can't flip without seeing dozens of shaky-cam video feeds with bad lighting and people acting badly. It's the reverse of internet anonymous fuckwad syndrome... put someone in front of a camera and it all becomes bravado.
So yeah. I'd like to have Discovery Network back from the "reality" phase and showing some documentaries or something. Thing is, the shows I'd like to watch are actually about reality. They're just not gossip.
About 9 AM today I got a call from Nielsen letting me know I was selected for the TiVo program with them. Asked a few questions and said I was in. One question I have is a technical one. First, does it only count if you watch or does it also count what you record? What if you watch a suggestion? Time limit on ratings, I could watch a recorded show a year later? Lastly, what about when you have multiple tivos?
Hoyty
Yeah, I have Tivo and authorized the same. I don't see the need for a paper diary when they can just tell them what my season passes are. Says a lot to have a TV show as a season pass. Basically you really like it.
Now maybe they will get a clue that they should bring back Futurama. That and not cancell any great shows anymore like Futurama, Farscape, two guys and a girl, family guy, etc...
Im soooo tired of awesome shows coming out and them getting a good following, but the non-cable channels executives don't have the courage or staying power to keep them on the air.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
I think you meant Whisky Tango Foxtrot
For Reference:
Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta
Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel
India Juliet Kilo Lima
Mike November Oscar Papa
Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango
Uniform Victor Whisky X-ray Zulu
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
The server is almost done. Plan to have SOAP based transfers for client and Tivo-like recording suggestions for viewers to have the incentive to sign up.
The next big step is a general client SDK licensed under BSD with multiple languages to integrate in any PVR/DVR. Need C++ for MythTV, Python for Freevo, and enough docs to help commercial systems integrate it.
Not sure how commercially viable it is, or how popular it can be made...
If anybody wants to work on it with me, please contact me.
I'm participating in that very program and at least for us, there are no paper diaries. We signed a document that allowed Neilsen to utilize the data TiVo downloads from our recorder on a nightly basis. The reason I agreed to this violation of my privacy is that it allows me to have a direct impact on the shows that I like.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
While I may be a paranoid tinfoil hat wearing nut who doesn't want Tivo knowing what I watch and rewind, my reasoning is dictated more by the fact that I like to customize my box, add functionality, watch videos I download, and freely distribute content to every PC in my house.
The WAF (wife approval factor) is quite high, and it's definitely a hit with the kids. Add the fact that I've learned way more about Linux in the past year than I did over the past 6 years as a casual user and I consider the project a huge success.
^^vv<><>BA
"He's TIMESHIFTING OUR RIGHTS!!!!" nearly made me spew a mouthfull of water all over my keyboard. thanks for the laughs
How did this get modded troll? He's joking you freaks!
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
This article http://www.livedigitally.com/2004/10/nielsen-ad-ra tings-bully.html (from LIVEdigitally) has some insight about the new "LPM" units, and why the advertisers aren't necessarily playing ball with the new Nielsen technologies. Kinda interesting if you are following this stuff.
Tivo can negotiate how much they want for the data they collect. Typical Joe Public can't because another Joe Public will take the $5 and be content since they don't see it as valuable anyway. Tivo knows exactly how much it's worth. And it's more than $5 per viewer per week.
Just look at how much various shows can pay their cast and demand from advertisers. That kind of information is worth a lot of money.
Nielson is using a limited number of viewers to extrapolate the larger population. Tivo has access to a much greater population than Nielson can reach. And the data is already entered into a database and ready to be mined using statistical software. There's no time and money consuming data entry by people.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
As a mythtv user, if there existed a module where I could choose to upload my non-anonymous tv recording and watching history in exchange for say $25/month and some monthly survey, I don't think I'd mind one bit.
I'm Currently doing a Nielson diary this week, when they called they asked if I have a DVR, which I do (Myth DOES count!) The diary itself though is POORLY Designed. This is not the first time I've done a Tv Diary, its just a list of days and times where you list the channel watched...with an additional page at the end for shows recorded but watched later... theres no way to list shows from two months ago that I've recorded, but not watched... and they even call a DVR a DVD (digital video Device) so they have a LONGGGGG way to go yet.. gotta go and update yesterdays viewing ...
Last Post!
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.