I don't understand why the previous bill split along party lines. I know the republicans are usually associated with corporate interests, but is this part of either party's official ideology or agenda?
You don't understand it because it didn't happen. The article is seriously misinformed. The bill in question (S.2917) was read by Senator Snowe on the Senate floor on May 19, 2006, where it was referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. There was no vote, party lines or not. It was not killed. It presumably died of natural causes in committee when the 109th Congress ended, as there is no mention of it in the committee record.
Is Nielsen doing it differently now? We had a Nielsen box a few years ago, and it had buttons on it you were supposed to press to indicate which members of the family were watching at any given time.
No. People meters have had the buttons since 1991 (possibly before that too).
It was fun for the first couple hours, just because of the novelty, but then it got real old real quick. Of course, it was terribly inaccurate. People forget to press their buttons when they start or stop watching.
Pressing buttons is currently the only accredited way of making sure you're actually watching. Just because you're in the same room as a TV set doesn't mean you're watching. As you point out, it also introduces a certain amount of inaccuracy. "Button fatigue" is a hot topic in Research, and they're looking at everything from adapting A/P Meters to installing facial recognition devices to fix it.
We'd press extra buttons to add fictitious viewers for shows we really liked. Etc.
That's possibly why you're no longer a Nielsen home. We do notice these things, believe it or not.;)
Each day, Nielsen publishes an install count and an intab count. Installs are all the homes with people meters. Intabs are those homes that aren't trying to play Tetris on their set tops.
Nielsen make their money conducting market research surveys.
ACNielsen makes their money conducting market research surveys. Nielsen Media Research makes their money by selling overnight TV viewing data to networks, advertisers, and whoever else wants to pay for it.
For the few that don't know (it's at least common knowledge where I live) theirs only about 5,000 people with "Nielsen Boxes" which is hardly a good measurement of the entire country.
Your information is quite out of date. Last I checked (about a week ago), NMR maintained a sample of 8,144 metered households in the US and they're currently expanding to 10,000. Any high school statistics student can tell you that's more than enough to produce meaningful estimates for any size population.
Sweeps are purely a local market abomination. Sweeps used to be the only times of year that all the local markets could afford diary service. Now that most of the major local markets in the US can afford Local People Meters which measure viewing year round (like the National sample has done since 1991), sweeps will likely become meaningless.
Nielsen Media Research (NMR) mainly does TV ratings, so DVD sales don't really count. ACNielsen (ACN) does consumer market research, which does track DVD sales. VNU now owns both, which is what makes Project Apollo possible in the first place.
VNU has media and market services in 100 countries, including Thailand. NMR operates television and radio measurement services and ACN operates consumer market measurement services, both out of Bangkok. Granted, the Thai ratings don't mean as much to the major networks as the US ratings do, but do they mean a lot in the local markets.
I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.
What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to licensethetech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.
Portable People Meters belong to Arbitron, not Nielsen Media.
Not sure about PPM's tech, but Nielsen's A/P meter does exactly what TFA describes. That's the only way Nielsen Media could roll out Time Shifted Viewing at all (disclosure: I work for them). To say that Google "created" it is an insult to the people I work with every day.
I see a patent suit in Google's future. As much as I hate patents and like Google, I'd like to at least see some full disclosure here. To (erroneously) state one one hand that they invented the technology and then admit (on page 4 of the PDF) that they intend to compete with the actual inventors, they're begging to get sued anyway.
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You don't understand it because it didn't happen. The article is seriously misinformed. The bill in question (S.2917) was read by Senator Snowe on the Senate floor on May 19, 2006, where it was referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. There was no vote, party lines or not. It was not killed. It presumably died of natural causes in committee when the 109th Congress ended, as there is no mention of it in the committee record.
Look it up.
It's labeled Exhibit C to Settlement Agreement
That's possibly why you're no longer a Nielsen home. We do notice these things, believe it or not. ;)
Each day, Nielsen publishes an install count and an intab count. Installs are all the homes with people meters. Intabs are those homes that aren't trying to play Tetris on their set tops.
Sweeps are purely a local market abomination. Sweeps used to be the only times of year that all the local markets could afford diary service. Now that most of the major local markets in the US can afford Local People Meters which measure viewing year round (like the National sample has done since 1991), sweeps will likely become meaningless.
Nielsen Media Research (NMR) mainly does TV ratings, so DVD sales don't really count. ACNielsen (ACN) does consumer market research, which does track DVD sales. VNU now owns both, which is what makes Project Apollo possible in the first place.
VNU has media and market services in 100 countries, including Thailand. NMR operates television and radio measurement services and ACN operates consumer market measurement services, both out of Bangkok. Granted, the Thai ratings don't mean as much to the major networks as the US ratings do, but do they mean a lot in the local markets.
Nielsen's been working on total measurement for years. Arbitron and VNU (current holders of Nielsen Media research) got together to build Project Apollo. However, because of the trouble Arbitron is having getting its Portable People Meter accredited, Apollo's deploying Nielsen's A/P Meter instead, which I've commented on before.
I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.
What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to license the tech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.
Not sure about PPM's tech, but Nielsen's A/P meter does exactly what TFA describes. That's the only way Nielsen Media could roll out Time Shifted Viewing at all (disclosure: I work for them). To say that Google "created" it is an insult to the people I work with every day.
I see a patent suit in Google's future. As much as I hate patents and like Google, I'd like to at least see some full disclosure here. To (erroneously) state one one hand that they invented the technology and then admit (on page 4 of the PDF) that they intend to compete with the actual inventors, they're begging to get sued anyway.