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Your Online TV Watching Can Now Be Tracked Across Devices
itwbennett (1594911) writes A partnership between TV measurement company Nielsen and analytics provider Adobe, announced today, will let broadcasters see (in aggregate and anonymized) how people interact with digital video between devices — for example if you begin watching a show on Netflix on your laptop, then switch to a Roku set-top box to finish it. The information learned will help broadcasters decide what to charge advertisers, and deliver targeted ads to viewers. Broadcasters can use the new Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, as they're called, beginning early next year. Early users include ESPN, Sony Pictures Television, Turner Broadcasting and Viacom.
Can they track how many times I tried to purchase the content legally before joining a swarm?
If I could delete 3 things from all existence they would be:
3: Professional sports
2: Fatties
1: Advertising
The amount of time and money the world wastes on these 3 useless things is extraordinary.
Up till now, the TV Nielsens have been ruling the roost when it comes to how many people are watching something. Now with tracking added that includes online content on something of an equal basis, the real TV customers (the people who pay for ads) will know what the product (the viewers being shown advertising) is actually doing. This being Slashdot, people are no doubt running to the store to pay for a roll of tinfoil with a Bitcoin, but it's really not the Orwellian nightmare that you might expect. Imagine if there had been this richness of data for some shows like Firefly that were floundering in the TV ratings, yet were developing a following based on online views -- the audience was following the new episodes, but lagging the broadcast by a few months as they caught up.
I expect that many shows which got mishandled on broadcast yet had some redeeming value and a loyal (young, target demographic market) who aren't showing up on TV lists (because they don't own one) are going to now be more represented -- and that's going to lead to better programming for the people who like that. Perhaps the "sit in front of the TV" market will be eclipsed by the "sit in front of the tablet/smartphone" market as that becomes the way people consume television.
It might also clearly show what many of the cable providers keep denying but don't want to admit -- there's a tremendous market for (effectively) a la carte television that's being consumed right now. They can keep denying it, but it's going to be very hard for them to have leverage in deals with (especially) sports leagues when the Nielsen numbers show that it would be a great business decision to provide an app rather than going through cable to reach a larger audience who is young, hip and spends money.
As a cable-cutter who primarily gets video as OTA HDTV I for one was confused (for a second) by their use of the term "Digital Video".
What might have been better would be to call it "streaming video" or some such, to better indicate that the article is actually web-specific only.
Also, the "digital" part is pretty much redundant these days anyway, as there is no analog TV anymore (except maybe a few holdouts on cable), so pretty much all video is now digital. Saying "digital video" has basically become analogous to saying "electric TV".
Most of those channels are religious and Spanish channels.
Of what's left, Netflix does a much better job of replicating most of their content in a superior format with a better user interface.
Netflix is like the 32 of those rerun dominated channels from your 500 channel cable package.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My thoughts exactly. It's obvious that Netflix can track you across devices because you are signed into your account and profile. They've been able to do this since they started streaming videos. I don't see how this has anything to do with advertisements though, as Netflix is a pay service and does not show any ads.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.