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Nielsen Adapting To Modern TV-Watching
Ant wrote to mention a C|Net story discussing fundamental changes in how the Nielsen company tracks viewership. From the article: "CNET says that the Nielsen company is finally taking one of several steps aimed at adapting to the new television/TV audience (those who use TiVo or another service to record prime time shows for viewing later) on December 26th, 2005. Ratings will be broken out by how shows are watched--live, later in the day or within a seven-day period. Over time, Nielsen will also move to measure viewing that takes place via iPods, cellular/cell phones, laptops, and other digital devices that are gaining TV privileges. The company also will track audiences for on-demand fare. The steps are a radical change for Nielsen, reflecting an overall paradigm shift that's shaking up the television world. The audience is taking control. And TV companies are scrambling to catch up."
You bastard!!! You got Enterprise cancelled!!!
Every dumbass knows that Nielson is just a stupid shallow representation of the idiots of the United States.. And, you, supposedly beeing a geek, should know that. You should've had your TV timer set to automatically turn the damn thing on during Enterprise and off after Enterprise.. It doesn't matter if you were watching it or not... You represented something like 1,000,000 geeks and you decided some random measurement that Neilson doesn't yet measure was more important.. Shame on you.
Why be a Nielson kiddie if you're not even going to do your TV watching or purposeful misrepresentation through the damn Nielson system? At least make it SEEM like you were a geek.. Instead, you made it seem like geeks are unmarketable through the current system (ya.. maybe so.. but who cares) and have no money to spend.. and they watch no shows. Thus, Nielson people can readily say, "Hey.. we need more stupid reality shows because smart people don't watch TV."
Ass. I hate you.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Is Nielsen interested in BT?
Short answer: Yes, no, and maybe.
(disclosure: I am a Nielsen employee based out of their GTIC facility in Florida. Beautiful place BTW.)
In the past, Nielsen has recorded time shifting as viewing. After all, why go through the trouble of setting your VCR to record a show if you're not going to watch it? And then TiVo had to mess it all up. It constantly records things you don't even ask for. Even if you do end up watching it eventually, it could be a week or a month later.
C|Net missed the real story here, which is how this turned the delicate balance of power between advertisers and content providers upside-down and how Nielsen's reinventing itself to keep time shifting from destroying the television industry. But that's OT.
Now there's Live, Live+SD, and Live+7 feeds as described in the article. The bad part about it is that practically overnight we have to process three times the data we did before, and our delivery windows were tight enough as it was. The good part about it is that we're no longer dependant on the tuner.
No TV? No problem! Here's your A/P meter. Now you can get your content from cable, DVRs, iPods, or *gasp* BitTorrent. It's not our business to know what you've recorded/downloaded/uploaded. It is our business to report on if you actually watch the darned thing (and then only if you've signed up as a Nielsen Home).
That said, we're not quite there yet. Right now we're focused on DVRs, but with this shift in our business makes the rest of it possible.