Nielsen Will Measure TV ratings Among DVR Users

prostoalex writes "TV ratings publisher Nielsen is one company that got affected by the digital video recorder boom. With 7 million households recording TV shows and watching them on their own schedules, the concept of primetime changes, and the audience reporting is becoming skewed. So now Nielsen is launching a special program for DVR households, which would allow advertisers and TV executives to track the popularity of TV programs. Nielsen plans to distribute paper diaries among the households that use digital video recorder. Last time I did a Nielsen TV rating diary, they paid $5 a week."

Re:Torrents?

[Moofius.the.Cow]

This wouldn't be terribly hard to do on an automatic basis, as long as you had access to a good directory of torrents.

Just connect to each of the trackers in question, note which IPs have completed downloads of the shows you're interested in, and correlate this with your records of other trackers*.

* Mass lawsuit against your fans optional.

Their Data will be Mythical - or will it?

[icebike]

Of course they are only likely to get information from people they can easily find, such as Tivo Customers and Sat TV companies who supply boxes with recording cabpabilities.

They will totally miss those using Mythtv ( http://www.mythtv.org/ [mythtv.org] ) or Freevo ( http://freevo.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] ) or any other home brew solution.

No paper diary required for DirecTiVo

[Fear the Clam]

Nielsen plans to distribute paper diaries among the households that use digital video recorder.

I got a call from the Nielsen survey guy this morning (who in hell calls at 9:07 on a Saturday morning?) asking if we wanted to take part in the DVR survey. He specifically told me that with the DirecTivo, other than signing the permission for them to monitor the shows I watched/recorded, we wouldn't have to do anything.

With luck, this will result in better data than last time. Last year we were asked to fill out a paper diary, but my wife was hogging the television all week watching the baseball playoffs, so that skewed the results.

Unfortunately...

[jangobongo]

You can't just "sign up" to be a Neilson "family". They have to contact you. They study demographics and then invite only certain qualifying households to participate.

The nice thing is, though, if you have any problems with your TVs or cable (etc) service, they will send someone over to repair or fix the problem. Anything to keep you watching... We got free service on our TVs that way.

A negative is that you start to become a slave to your TV, because you're "voting" for your favorite shows. Gotta stay home and watch, you know. I always wondered how many Neilson "families" would turn on the TV to certain shows/channels, even when no one was physically there in ffront of the TV to watch.

Re:One thing they carefully will NOT measure...

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Nielsen cheerfully tells you what shows are watched, but won't tell you whether the audience kept the commercials on, or whether they muted them, skipped forward, or changed channels for 3 minutes.

Actually reporting what commercials are viewed to completion with sound-on would radically change televsion programming and advertising.

FWIW, Tivos have the ability to do all of this, assuming of course that the owner of the Tivo uses the stock remote instead of a universal remote, and most Tivo owners do use the stock remote.

The tivo remote also has the ability to control your TV and your sound system, and when e.g. you press the mute button, adjust the volume, or turn off the tv, the remote simultaneously sends another IR signal to the tivo telling the tivo what button was pressed, and the tivo logs it and reports it to the company every night. It also logs when you fast forward, rewind, instant replay, etc. It also logs what recordings you have watched throughout the day, how long you've watched them for, how many times you've watched them, etc.

Re:What's the point of a diary in this case?

[beaststwo]

I have a ReplayTV box and it definitely sends stuff back to mommy. Since I started having it dial to a Linux box in my house to use my DSL connection, I started capturing all network traffic to and from it when it connects at night. In a typical night, it gets about 150KB of info and sends about 100KB.

The only things that Neilsen can't get like this in knowledge of who in the family is watching and where they fit in the demographic. So a 40-year old like me might gets ads for Britney or Polygrip, when I really want to see "Bob the Enzyte guy".

Also, my bet would be that ReplayTV and Tivo would want more green than the lousy $5 they pay to the public.

Re:Torrents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually www.tvtorrents.net already has those stats - look in the 'completes' column.

Re:Already signed up.

[xanderwilson]

Even without that agreement, Tivo keeps track of what people watch, but says they do it entirely anonymously. Which is why they got to know the "most replayed' moment during the Superbowl half time. I'm surprised Neilson doesn't just pay for that data directly from Tivo. They did that, and I'd even Tivo the Whedon episodes I have on DVD.

Alex.

Re:What's the point of a diary in this case?

[Anonymous Coward]

as i sit in a time warner building at a time warner PC I can tell you that your DVR recordings are done locally and are thus not being logged.

now Icontrol or On demand... that is a different story as it is streamed from a server, so we have server like stats for it. Just like you might on a webserver.

Pretty stupid experience

[thoughtlover]

We recently got rid of the Niesen 'box' in the house I live in. We had four roommates when we started and they didn't really participate. We also know that we are in the two most difficult groups to market to (young women and 25-35 year-old men - yeah, you read that right!) - yet, Nielsen didn't really pay much attention us. I remember a friend who was also doing the survey and he said that they would call his house if they weren't sticking to pressing the 'confirm button' on what looked like antiquated gear (circa 1970's) - the box wold start flashing all of it's lights in a crazed pattern if the person who changed the TV channel didn't also confirm the change with the Nielsen remote. One day, the Nielsen rep came to their door with $50 asking them nicely to be more diligent participants. He did that every month for about three months since they kept it up. At the beginning, they gave us $200 and paid for the monthly land-line phone fee (for their equipment to talk to the local server.)

All of the experience made me curious. I wondered why it took them so long to switch to something more hi-tech. Cable boxes have been out since the 70's. I remember watching Jaws on HBO when I was a kid. We could have easily been a Nielsen house then if they got wise earlier. We didn't give them any useful information in the hopes they would come back to us and say 'it's so important for our statistic pool, here's another $200.'

They never did. We did get Dish with a DVR so that was a great reason to ditch the 'UFO' that roosted on our TV.

One thing they did do was break our VCR when they opened it up to install their sensing equipment. They replaced it with a new one, and then, when they packed up, they gave us a new one in the box because the technician needed to install it at a new house. I think it was refurbished because there was a sticker on the plastic inside that said 'Do Not Return To Retailer' - maybe Nielsen gets them in bulk.

We probably gave them more bunk data than usable. In the end, I guess I'd have to say that we came out on top because I didn't own a VCR with stereo inputs until they came along.

We will be one of the measured families

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting anon for this...

We volunteered for the measuring when it showed up in our DirecTivo Showcase a few weeks ago. Yesterday they called us during dinnertime and asked us questions for about 10 minutes about the makeup of our family.

We're happy to volunteer, if only to support the shows that we like to watch.

Re:That explains a lot

[ke4roh]

I did a paper diary at Nielson's request some years ago - perhaps in 2000 - and they paid a whopping $1 for the data. We wrote down what shows we actually watched, those that were on but nobody was particularly watching, and the shows we liked that we didn't get a chance to watch. We also noted which shows we recorded (by VCR at the time) for later viewing. We didn't expend effort watch everything we like, we just did our usual stuff.

I imagine they have different tiers - people paid $1 are differently motivated than people paid $5. Likewise, people with a set-top box (or a DVR) report different informaiton than those who write it all down. (TiVo switches back to playing live TV after a little while - whether the TV is on or not, nevermind if someone is in the room or not.)

WHISKY

[multipartmixed]

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Re:Already signed up.

[whmac33]

I just did a Nielsen survey.

They tracked a lot more than what was tuned to on the TV. They had columns for each person in the house and when they were watching and how old and what sex each person is. They even wanted to know what the tv was on when we weren't watching.

Nielsen isn't just total market share. It's demographics and stuff... Tivo can't automatically monitor that stuff.... I don't think.

Also it had a section for what shows I used the myth box to record when I was watching live tv.