Nielsen Finally Recognizing That People Don't Watch TV The Same Way
from the took-a-while dept
Years in the planning, tracking firm Nielsen is finally going to start recognizing that a lot of people don't watch live TV any more, thanks to DVRs. They're going to start including stats on when people watch shows, not just whether or not they watched them. It will be interesting to see both what this data suggests -- and how TV execs respond to it. After all, back when Nielsen started using their people meter devices to realize that men weren't watching as much TV, the TV execs freaked out and said Nielsen's new measurement system must have been wrong. The more likely story was simply that Nielsen's old diary-based method of tracking TV shows wasn't accurate and had been hiding the shift away from TV for some time. The same sort of revelation may come as the company looks more closely at time shifting TV as well.
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Many men do watch less television than women.
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
Since this data is most likely gathered for advertising purposes, let's hope the focus stays on TV. I see far too many ads while on the computer. TV has become completely unappealing to me now.
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
It beats having to do the dishes.
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
So what do us guys do all day, anyways?
...should be properly worded as:
So what do *we* guys do all day, anyways?
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
Devil's Advocate:
So what do *we* guys do all day, *anyways*?
Should be
So what do *we* guys do all day, anyway?
"Anyway", not "Anyways".
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
Aaaaanyyyyway....
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Re: Many men do watch less television than women.
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Watching the realtime stream
Dr Who and sometimes CSI are currently the only shows I watch when they are streamed.
All other shows get buffered to watch later at a more convenient time or when there's nothing else to do.
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Rethinking advertisement...
An example is with sporting events... you'll see something flash by with a little sound to catch your attention without the program ever taking a break (much like in NFL, "The Cheetos Instant Replay!" or the "Visa Skycam").
Perhaps a margin will come up along an edge with information in there, kinda like how they do with credits at the end of a movie when previews of what's next are playing in the rest of the screen.
And if all else fails, there's always product placement. Judging by my recent movie and TV watching, the industry is just begging to whore itself out to anybody with a dollar and something to sell.
-@
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Nielsen and DVRs
Of course, if you have owned a TiVO, you understand that this is silly. TiVO owners tend to not think about channels and to think about programs - I like "King of the Hill" and it is currently on three different channels I think - I could tell you I watched it but I probably could not tell you what channel I recorded it from. This is not because the information is not available to me, it is because it is unimportant, so I never look. The "wishlist" records the program no matter what channel or time it happens to be on.
The response was to send me a letter asking if they could "bug" my TiVO. So I gave them permission and I assume that they did and I have assumed that they listened for a while.
My point is that they have colledted this data for some time - unreliably through diaries, reliably by bugging TiVOs and this is simply whether they are reporting it or not. If they bug your TiVO, they know, to the second, when you watched the program, when it was recorded, how many commercials you skipped and when and how you used the instant replay feature - as reported (for example) by this article. http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=7795
So, well, this is a reporting decision, not a collection decision.
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