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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.
Now I'm even happier I cancelled Netflix.
Can they track how many times I tried to purchase the content legally before joining a swarm?
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".
I live in the Boston metro area about 25 miles away from the broadcast towers and I get ABC, CBS, NBC, CW, FOX, two PBS and a couple independents. There are a couple Spanish channels and a shopping channel. There are subchannels on each so it ends up being something like 25 channels available. Some of them run reruns and old movies, for sure, but I get first run of anything on broadcast (goes into the TiVo), plus PBS has a lot of decent programming.
We also have Netflix and Amazon Prime but if you do your homework using sites like antennapoint.com and antennaweb.com you can get an antenna that's correctly sized and point it in the right direction, in addition to getting a rough idea of what you should be able to receive from your location.
TPB isn't just cheaper than other services it's better. In fact that's the main thing. Advantages of TPB:
* No Ads during the show (though I have to concede that impossibly proportioned women do appear to want to date my testicles).
* Huge library including some obscure stuff you can't buy.
* Great search.
* All shows in one place.
* No DRM: watch on any device you like, laptop, phone, random set top box.
* No streaming bullshit. Works online or off, on a flakey connection or a good one.
* Variety of different resolutions and qualities allowing you to trade off quality and download speed.
* Great clients for managing multiple downloads.
* Really great options for viewing the media. MPlayer I love you.
* Timely: the shows are usually online very fast. No waiting years for it to arrive legally. Yes that still happens.
* No ausive region coding (see no DRM). Yes I own those discs legally. No I'm not going to pay to buy another DVD player just to satisfy some abusive jerkweeds who think I'm some sort of crook for having lived abroad.
* No net connection required to watch the shows once acquired.
And now:
* Doesn't creepily track you.
It's amazing how much better a service you get while sailing the seven seas and looting the merchentmen, arr, matey.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Even worse, it doesn't matter if 10,000,000 watch a show.
The Neilson numbers come in several forms. The ones you see daily are called "Live and Same Day" (L+SD), which counts views that watched the show live and within 24 hours of airing. Other numbers you can easily find are Live+3 days (L+3) and Live+7 (L+7).
But none of those numbers are actually used by anyone. That's why Neilson gives them out for free. No one's paying for that information, nor will they ever. And that's not where they make their money.
The real money is in the C3 number, or if you're CBS, you convinced advertisers to take C7 numbers. What are these? They're commercial ratings (for programming watched live to 3 days later). Basically you take the L3/L7 numbers, strip out the numbers while the program is showing, and you're left with just the numbers related to the advertising. And that's the number that makes Neilson money and the number stations pay money for. And yes, you skip ads on your DVR, which pull down those C3 numbers because it lowers the viewers for the advertising.
And that's because the largest source of income is advertising. Sure they get some through cable fees and Hulu and iTunes/Amazon/DVD etc. sales, but that's a tiny fraction of advertising.
CBS managed this season to convince advertisers to pay the C7 rate rather than C3, because well, it more accurately reflects today's lifestyle of people who record a show and watch it later in the week.
And that's all that matters. It doesn't matter if you can find 100,000,000 people to watch a show - if it's not reflected in those 100,000,000 people watching the ads.
It also brings up cord cutters who prefer to download their TV programming from torrents and such - as far as the industry is concerned, they don't care because those people don't add to advertising ratings.
Even under the new system - the new system just means that Neilson can more accurately measure their ratings, but if you're not watching the ads, it means jack squat to the producers.
So that super popular show people pirate? Guess what, the TV industry really doesn't care - you never were a "customer" and it doesn't matter if only 1M people watched it on TV while 100M people watched it off torrents - if those 1M people can't justify the ad rates and production costs, it's getting canned. The 100M other people? Too f'in bad - if it was that good, they should've watched it with ads.
If you ever wondered why worrying over TV piracy has subsided, that's one reason (who cares about pirates - they obviously don't care about their TV show), the other is they've found legal streaming to be even better. Because if they put a stream online to watch programming, they can make it such that you can't skip ads, and that's actually worth something - enough to pay for the effort of putting an online stream up. So you beat both DVR owners and appear as a hero for making a legal source available.
Bonus material - 2014-2015 TV season ad rates (30 second spot). This is what brings in the money.
http://variety.com/2014/tv/new...