Nielsen's mobile-TV challenge

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The first big change from this system will be seen starting Dec. 26, when the company uses its new technology to begin focusing on the use of digital video recorders such as TiVo, reporting whether viewers watched a show live, later the same day of broadcast, or within seven days of the date it was aired.

The company has also promised to use the technology to give advertisers a better indication of whether commercials are being watched or skipped, Starcom's Sirkin said. But she still wants Nielsen to step up the pace of change.

"It's happening too slowly, and still with not enough focus on what the advertisers and the agencies want," Sirkin said. "We just have to keep shouting."

Getting portable
Getting to devices like cell phones or iPods can be trickier, but it's possible, the company says.

Nielsen is working with the major consumer electronics companies to develop software that can sit on phones or the iPod itself and track what's being watched. In the case of the iPod, the company may put software on a computer that registers what is being transferred to the device, and then later check the device's logs to see which files have actually been played. As with any of these technologies, that would require the permission of the iPod-owning panel member, but it's technically feasible, the company says.

"There is an inexhaustible supply of consumer devices that come on the market every year, and they're getting really clever," Nielsen Chief Technology Officer Bob Luff said in an interview with CNET News.com. "But as I've said before, we've never met a device we couldn't measure."

Maybe so, but Nielsen may still see its ratings crown tarnish if it doesn't keep up with changing behavior as well as the technology itself. Radio research company Arbitron, for example, has developed new technology that measures consumers' exposure to media outside the home, and is seeking a joint venture with Nielsen to launch it into the TV world.

Arbitron has created a tool it calls the Portable People Meter, which is carried around like a small cell phone and picks up its own code embedded in the audio of a program wherever a viewer is. That allows the company to track viewing even at bars, or at friend's homes, for example.

The company is testing it in Houston and says it has found that about 15 percent of TV viewing, for all ages and demographics, actually takes place outside the home. It's now trying to persuade Nielsen to adopt the portable device for its own measurement panels.

"Our main priority is to get Nielsen to agree to the joint venture," said Arbitron spokesman Tom Mocarsky.

For its part, Nielsen says it is still evaluating the Arbitron technology and will decide, by the first quarter of 2006, whether to use it.

However, some believe all of this doesn't address concerns that the fundamental ad-supported business model of television is changing, some experts say. If people begin buying programming by the episode, or watching commercial-free video on demand, the old measurement systems will need more radical change than what Nielsen is planning.

"I think you're seeing a breakdown of the traditional model, where television had sponsorship and was delivered over the air, or by cable and satellite," said Erwin Ephron, a longtime TV industry consultant. "The bigger story is really a rethinking of what television is."

[Earl Benser]

Funny thing....

.... All the various ratings seem to say that show I consider to be
less than junk are the most watched. I'd sure love to think that
the rating systems are wrong. I'd hate to think that the rating
systems are right - the inferences are very unflattering to the
viewing population. Or, of course, I could just be weird in
disliking flatulent sitcoms, totally illogical 'mystery' shows, and
over-scripted 'reality' shows.

So do statistics lie????? Or do liars use statistics????? Or is the
whole network TV world really going to hell in a hand basket?????

[Mister C]

It would be funny

That is, if your assessments weren't so accurate. Unfortunately the current state of TV is just sad! A medium controlled by the marketing folks and reduced to the lowest common denominator.

?And So It Goes: Adventures in Television? by Linda Ellerbee, ISBN 0-425-10237-8 does a real nice job of explaining the system.

[TV James]

Not a new problem...

I've always maintained that the Neilsen number was too small, and probably skewed. How else do certain shows stay on the air? I'm using the flawed "no one I know watches this show" argument, but seriously, at some point there has to be some merit to it. If for nothing else than to say that the Neilsen uses too small a measurement, or needs to break it out more locally if, in fact, there is a part of this country that really does watch "Two and a Half Men" -- and I'm not counting people comatose on their couches drooling at the TV because they don't own remote controls.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I don't see how Neilsen is going to stuff it back in. I know so many people drool over the "overnights" that there are people paid to read them early each morning, record them and make them available at non-published numbers at the networks so you can call in and hear them.

I imagine that the tide is really turning towards people who time-shift. We rarely watch things as they air, often not even the same night. We'll make an exception for reality shows, but we'll start late so that we "catch up" by the end of the program.

If I could, I would get the east coast affiliates because with our schedule, it's impossible to stay up until 11 pm and still be useful at work the next day.

[TV James]

Tracking iPods?

I don't have an iPod, but the shows are commercial free, aren't they?

If it's for measurement purposes, I would assume that Apple can already tell ABC how many times someone has watched the episode of Lost they purchased. And if TiVo can provide stats and these cable set-top boxes are getting more and more computer like, it seems like Neilsen is going to eventually become largely irrelevant unless they reinvent themselves as an aggregator purchasing the data from TiVO, Apple, Comcast, DISH, etc., and packaging it all up in a neat tidy bundle for the networks.

Perhaps it's time they get out of their arguably flaw data collection business.

[suznick]

"TV is basically an advertising medium"

I learned this in a 1964 Journalism class (20 years before the Macintosh). The iPod and similar devices will force TV to break from that business model. Let's see if TV can innovate as well as Apple (not the Beatles Apple Records) has done in the last 20 years. Maybe Jobs needs to run a network.

[Peter Halmos]

Compure ACTNow Audio Clip Detection

To detect specific video or audio clips you can also use the audio clip detection technology covered by the ACTNow SDK. It tells you exactly when and where a specific audio clip (jingle, song, noise, etc.) was played back or recorded respectively. An evaluation version can be found at www.compure.com/download.asp. However it is an SDK so it's rather a toolkit for programmers.