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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.
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.
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.
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.