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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."
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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!
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?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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?
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).
... the word? Itches. Yes, yes it does.
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:"
One of my employees is a Nielsen viewer. I can't believe those guys are still going to keep ticking.
With video watching moving towards an on-demand basis, will advertisers really need to hire a company to track viewer preferences? The best thing advertisers can do is replac Tivo/MCE/Myth/whatever with completely free tuner/PVR units. Tivo can already tell advertisers what commercials were watched or skipped, what parts of a TV show were paused or reviewed, what channels are bounced between most often, etc. As TV becomes quickly available through iTunes or direct download, IPTV, and other "right now" provisions, we'll see our information traded in exchange for free TV.
I still believe that TV show production companies will find ways to offer advertising and spyware-free shows (a la the DVD format) for those willing to pay extra. Remember, advertising only exists for shows that are being watched in real time. Video taping, downloading, PVR, whatever means ads will likely be skipped or deleted altogether. We will definitely see more product placement as well as more pop-up advertising on top of TV shows as time goes on. Technology is quickly destroying the efficacy of advertising, so advertising will either have to morph or be left in the dust.
Nielsen, IMHO, is already being put into the incinerator. Their services were nice (*pat on head*) but its time for the new kid to play.
I wish Nielson could figure out that pre-announcing the date of US sweeps week ruins TV viewing. For one week out of the year every channel simultaneously has great programming. Then for the other fifty one weeks it sucks. Advertisers are stupid for believing that sweeps week is at all representative of viewing patterns. Imagine how advertising rates would have been set if 9/11 had happened during sweeps week - cable news would have had top share.
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.
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!