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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!
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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