In an effort to devise new ways to gauge yet another new, hard-to-measure television audience, Nielsen Media Research launched an experiment this summer to collect viewership data on the TiVo personal recorder from 20 homes scattered across the United States.
Nielsen technicians spent much of the summer wiring up their meters to the TiVo units, all of which carry new software from TiVo that enables Nielsen to track what is recorded as well as if and when the recordings are viewed.
The 20 homes include 10 that were already Nielsen households for national ratings. All received a free TiVo unit as part of their agreement to participate.
"TiVo and other time-shifting devices have all the earmarks of being a real consumer hit," Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus said. "Time-shifting will be something more people are really comfortable with. We never know if the technology is going to sizzle or fizzle, but you can't wait until it takes off before you say, 'Hey, maybe we should measure this.'"
TiVo allows viewers to download shows onto a hard drive for later viewing as well as to "pause" the TV and then pick up where they left off, regardless of the elapsed time. So far, Loftus says, the device that debuted in 1998 is only in about 0.5 percent of U.S. households.
The experiment comes as Nielsen, which focuses mainly on TV viewership, is also joining radio-ratings king Arbitron in another field test that could hold the key to measuring Internet radio and TV, another new ratings riddle for researchers to decipher.
In that effort, now in its second year, 1,500 people in the Philadelphia area are carrying Portable People Meters that hear inaudible codes from the TV and radio.
The message is picked up by the pager-sized gizmo carried by participants who place the device into a base station at the end of the day to transmit the day's data to Arbitron and recharge the meter. Arbitron, the lead player in this effort, persuaded 47 radio stations, 11 broadcast stations and 25 cable networks to encode their programming for the experiment.
In March, two radio stations, WDEL (1150 AM) and WSTW (93.7 FM), put on separate codes for their broadcast and their Internet streams to test whether the PPMs could tabulate that information separately.
Next up is creating a second 1,500-participant group in Philadelphia to prove the data is accurate by showing that it is similar in both samples.
Arbitron spokesman Thom Mocarsky said the PPM could resolve the biggest challenge in the constantly shifting world of ratings collection: People are using media in more different places all the time.
Particularly in radio, listenership figures are always suspect.
"This is an entirely new and different way to measure TV and radio, because this measures the person, not the appliance," Mocarsky said.
"Instead of wiring boxes to TV sets, which is expensive and requires a lot of labor, we're giving meters to people. Every time a person is in the presence of a coded media, the PPM knows."
The PPM also knows whether a participant forgets to carry it because it contains a motion sensor. That helps counter the age-old problem of survey participants whose data has large gaps because, for instance, they don't fill out their ratings diary fast enough to remember all of what they listened to and when.
"We find on average 80 percent of the time the PPM gets carried," Mocarsky said. "That's not bad. We want to improve that 80 percent, so we have to learn how to make it so the people don't forget or remind them in such a way that we don't annoy the hell out of them."
Currently, Arbitron radio ratings rely solely on the 1.5 million people who each take one-week stints at manually filling out diaries throughout the year. Nielsen's local and national overnight ratings rely on households connected to ratings meters, and Nielsen also sends out about 1 million diaries as well for supplemental viewership data.
If the PPMs are proved successful -- and Mocarsky declined to offer a time frame for determining that -- then Nielsen would use it for TV ratings and Arbitron for radio ratings. The convenience of the devices would help the companies attract more participants and vastly expand the sample size, a much desired result in a world with an ever-expanding number of TV and radio stations.
Yet PPMs wouldn't solve every problem, so Nielsen will launch yet another experiment this fall to measure audiences involved with "interactive television." Loftus declined to detail what this effort would entail, but said the point is to show advertisers the effectiveness of tie-ins between TV and the Internet.
"If I'm watching Friends and at the same time clicking onto a website for something I've seen on Friends, how do we measure that?" Loftus said. "I want to know if the viewer saw something on TV and, as a result, accessed my website."
