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."

Comments

Very interesting

[Andy Dodd]

I wonder if Nielsen will start monitoring BitTorrent trackers (not to bust people, but simply to measure popularity.)

I remember at one point, between the top two torrents of LOST, there were 5,000-10,000 seeders, 10-15k completes, and 20-30k people leeching within the first 12-24 hours.

I did the Nielson ratings for five years...

[mark-t]

And the only thing they didn't know about my tv watching was exactly what I was watching if I was just playing a tape. But they sure knew which programs I had recorded for later viewing. It was one of the many subjects that came up during the orientation.

This could change everything...

[mr_zorg]

Hooray! I've been one of the new Nielsen TiVo households for about a year now and I'm thrilled to see them finally starting to break things out this way. The best part is it's easy, I don't have to do anything different, they just collect the data from TiVo. Finally shows like Mythbusters, Iron Chef, etc., might finally get some respect!

One other thing I thought of

[Andy Dodd]

Imagine what would happen if ISPs started supporting IP multicast. It would allow media content to be distributed MUCH more easily. I recall someone claiming that BitTorrent was now consisting of 25-50% of Internet backbone traffic - Imagine how much that could be reduced if multicast were used, given that probably 90% of that 25-50% are duplicate packets, if not more.

Unfortunately, we may not ever see IP multicast in its present form on the backbone. It requires too much additional memory in routers, and I have yet to see ANY information on how to find a free multicast address and reserve it for use. It's simply too hard for the average programmer/user to use.

I saw a couple of links to a Japanese multicast project known as Xcast, which would simply put multiple destination IP addresses in a packet, while it isn't as scalable as IP multicast, it's a hell of a lot easier to use. Unfortunately, since it isn't quite standardized yet, it's basically only supported on a handful of test networks, and I wouldn't be surprised if it stays that way.

In this day and age of mass media distribution, some form of multicast, even a limited one that only allows 8-16 destinations per packet, is desperately needed - so why the hell is there still no viable solution?

Re:One other thing I thought of

[Andy Dodd]

Multicast is at a lower layer than UDP and TCP, but due to the nature of multicast, it will not actually work with TCP, only with connectionless protocols such as UDP.

You're correct in that dropped packets would cause a problem for BT, since everyone needs the entire file. That said, if a client even received only 50% of a file via multicast, that would be 50% less that would eventually need to be handled via unicast, or via another multicast transmission. In reality, probably most clients would get 80% or more of the data in the first multicast go-around, and probably could get close to 95% or so after two full rounds of multicast. Eventually a unicast fallback or multicast rebroadcasts would be needed, but even with quite a bit of fallback to unicast or multicast rebroadcasting, far less data would need to be transmitted overall.

For example, suppose 100 clients downloaded a file. Those 100 clients only maintain a share ratio of 0.1:1. With multicast, the system would still perform extremely well, as even with 50% packet loss, each client would receive on average 5 complete copies of the data. (Of course, there is a nonzero probability that someone would still have a few holes, but those holes would be quite small.) In the current system with unicast, even if the clients maintain a 1:1 share ratio (counting retransmissions due to losses towards the client's upload), each client would wind up receiving less than a full copy - a share ratio higher than 1:1 is required for the system not to break.

It's about time!

[PurifyYourMind]

I always doubted the reliability of Nielsen ratings, especially given the cancellation of so many great shows (e.g. Family Guy.. for awhile anyway). Moreover, I have never, ever known anyone who's been in a so-called "Nielsen family". I guess my friends and I aren't average enough to make it into the sampling demographic.

One reason advertisers loved the web (at first, at least) was because it's possible to get exact numbers of "viewers", know what viewers are doing (clicking through, clicking then ordering, etc.), and not miss any viewers simply because they didn't get lucky enough to be sampled. I can't imagine being an advertiser trying to track my television ad results... what, survey everyone who walks in my store?

Fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

With respect to television usage, which is pretty much just ambient/background news stream, and not internet usage, I've wanted for the longest time for my provider to track not just my "usage" (customer watched show X on channel Y at time Z), but my NON-usage (customer was watching show X on channel Y and CHANGED channels at time Z, and returned or did not return).

Why? So they can match that with my desire to avoid StupidShit (tm). At times I'll bounce from CNN to Fox to MSNBC to Bloomberg when the same stupid commercial is played for the ninth time that hour.

Heh, " To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image:" ... the word? Itches. Yes, yes it does.

Re:Fantastic!

[penttan]

Dislcaimer: I work for a company that does television audience measurement (in Europe). In most countries the viewing data is collected by a peoplemeter device installed at the panel household's tv set. It automatically identifies the channel and can measure viewing behaviour second by second, although one minute is usually the smallest reported time. This kind of data makes analyzing all the things you mentioned (and much more) possible. For example, the gain and loss analysis of a program shows minute by minute chart of where the viewers are coming from (from another channel or just turned tv on) and where they are going. There are several software products that are used to analyze TV viewing data and the TV companies do use them. If the data is collected using diaries where the smallest reported time may be 5 or 15 minutes, this kind of analysis is more difficult. I believe that diaries are still used at some parts of USA.

...what?

[greyjoy]

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.

This reflects a change in how Nielson's gathering statistics, nothing more, nothing less. What paradigm shift? What control over television companies does the audience have now that they didn't have before? It's always nice to give voice to wishful thinking, but, c'mon, at least let your excuse have some relevance to your fantasies.

Also, I hope they take into account that most people who have videos on their iPods will overwhelmingly be well-off white people. I'm sure they're a valuable population statistic, but please don't let their viewing habits have too much weight in the overall viewing summary. I don't want every network to be (more) stacked with Dharma and Greg clones...

Re:Stop stretching shows

[Professor_UNIX]

Maybe, just maybe this will help end the new era of TV stations stretching their shows one (or like Cold Case, several) minutes later than their scheduled run time.

Cold Case doesn't run long because the show is more than 1 hour long, Cold Case runs because of the god damn football games running long, then that pushes 60 Minutes back and then Cold Case can start anywhere from 5-45 minutes late. I wrote a letter to CBS about this idiotic schedule they have but I of course received no response.. why would I? They don't care about DVR users since we don't watch their commercials. Other stations that usually play NFL football games either do (or used to at least) put crap shows for about an hour after a football game was scheduled to end so that if the game went longer than the time allotted they could cut into the show.

What I've had to resort to doing is setting Cold Case to record for an extra 60 minutes to ensure I catch the ending, but this in turn conflicts with other shows I want to record in the 9pm hour on Sunday (Desperate Housewives, Law and Order, etc.). Since I've only got two tuners in my PVR right now I need to decide which I don't get to watch because CBS's incompetent fall schedule. Soon I'll be adding a third and fourth tuner to the MythTV box so this will become less of an issue, but it still leaves me with a 2 hour recording block for a 1 hour show just because they can't nail down their time slots.

MythTV disqualified me

[mmontour]

Earlier this year I was invited to become a Nielsen viewer (in Canada). The first problem was that I did not have a telephone landline, and their box needed one in order to phone home with its data. They initially said there was nothing they could do, but a couple of months later they called back and offered to pay for the landline if I had one installed.

They then asked for details about my TVs and such, down to the brands and model numbers. This is becuase they had to hook up monitoring equipment to measure the channel selected by the tuner, whether the VCR was playing or recording, etc. Everything was OK until we got to my MythTV box (with PVR-350 card). They could not monitor it properly, so we had to call the whole thing off. The technician (who was quite impressed with what MythTV could do) said that they might have ways to monitor such setups in the future, but he wasn't sure about it.

Re:Out of control

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, audiences aren't taking control.

EXACTLY.. there's only one way to "take control" of television: don't watch it. As soon as you plop down and stare, somebody else is in the driver's seat.

I'm not against TV but don't be fooled: finding MORE ways to squeeze MORE video, advertising, and $$$ spent into your life is not "control". In corporate america, TV-viewing controls YOU!

It reminds me of cell phone adverts that talk about "freedom" .. our new phone/new service/extended coverage gives you more "freedom" .. hell no, it gives you a longer, more omni-present leash!

So yeah, you're totally right.. TV companies may take a while to exploit new technologies, but don't worry, once they figure it out, they'll milk it for all it's worth, and they'll do it with the blinding efficiency we all know and love.