I’ve never met a Nielsen family in my life. According to Cecil’s answer about Nielsen ratings, there are only about 25,000 Nielsen families in the entire country. The channel I’m tuned to on my cable box channel MUST be available to the cable company. Why aren’t the ratings collected that way? Is it a privacy issue? I’ve also heard there’s a subtle difference in power consumption when the TV is on rather than off. If this is true, why don’t cable companies do the Nielsen ratings?
Unless you’re watching a Pay Per View (PPV) or Video On Demand (VOD) movie, the cable company has no idea if you TV is even turned on, let alone what channel you’re watching and how many people are in front of the TV. Your TV does not tell the cable company if it’s on or off and the set top box only reports if a PPV or VOD channel is selected.
They might be able to tell if the set top box was unplugged. Set top boxes tend not to have on/off switches. The only way to turn them off is to pull the plug.
Not true anymore. As of May, 2014, my cable company will know exactly what channel and for how long, at least per converter box or card. Charter is going to all-digital, all on-demand. You change to channel 45 and they send you channel 45. About the only thing they won’t know is how loud the volume is or how many eyeballs are in the room, but give them time.
AFAIK, all cable companies do this now, or will very soon. Charter is one of the last to implement an all-digital system.
Nielsen ratings will probably still be needed for over-the-air signals, however, as long as those viewers are of any interest to the networks. So far, they still are.
They can’t tell if your television is turned on. Most people leave their tuner box turned on 24/7. If you turn your tuner box to the Poultry Channel just before you leave on vacation, it will look like you were watching Poultry Investigators 24 hours a day for two weeks.
I have UVerse. When I turn off the TV with the universal remote, it puts the tuner box in a standby mode as well. So it can know if it’s enabled or not.
In addition, UVerse doesn’t send all the channels at once. They only have enough bandwidth to send a few, and they send the ones I’m requesting. So UVerse certainly has the ability to know if I’m watching, and what I’m watching.
I’d also comment that in the past, I’ve been a Nielsen survey site for both radio and TV. I kept a log for a week, and sent the results in via mail.
My mom was a Nielsen family for a few weeks. I lobbied her to watch lots of Star Trek but she wouldn’t listen. 
I never met a Nielsen family in my life until this year when my own mother and stepfather became one through some arcane selection process. They are quite rare in population terms but I am one once removed and I guess you know one twice removed now. I still can’t say I understand why they were picked. They are hardly ever home (my mother travels 200 days a year) and they don’t watch much TV when they are home. Still, the technicians came in and hooked up some special Nielsen equipment into their house to monitor their viewing habits.
They supposedly get something out of it but it isn’t much. I can ask for more details on what they do and what it takes to be a Nielsen monitored household when I go there next month if you want. All I know now is that they have to have the equipment installed and fill out forms detailing their viewing habits. I would never do it unless they paid me a ton but they are getting older and still want some tenuous claim to power.
Everything I have read about Nielsen suggests that they can get much more accurate data through a combination of equipment and user reports than you can through automated monitoring. I don’t know if that is true these days but it once was so they may just keep influence through legacy inertia. Their sample size isn’t a problem. 25,000 people is much larger than it takes to model the whole world let alone just the U.S. as long as the sample is correctly taken in statistical terms.
I was in a Nielsen house in college.
My roommates and I got randomly selected and they installed the monitoring box on every TV in the house. So 3 in our rooms and one in the living room. We made enough on it to knock a good chunk off our bills each month.
Recently got a mailer from Nielsen asking me to fill out a survey to see if my wife and I would become a Nielsen house. They included two very crisp $1 bills for the trouble. I assume it’s for the sweeps journals, but who knows.
I’ve done Nielsen surveys several times, for both radio and TV.
If you get “junk mail” from them, don’t throw it away unopened, because, like Darth Sensitive said, it contains two fresh $1 bills. You’re still under no obligation to participate, but I did and was paid $5.
BTW, I’ve also been Gallup polled. Yes, Virginia, that really does exist.
Modern viewer figures track the amount of time and how many people are in the room. A TV sitting playing to itself will record no viewers, whilst the same TV with a family intently watching will record all the family members for the entire time. If you slip out to the kitchen they track that. This has been a mixed blessing, as the advertisers now have a much better understanding of how much they are getting for their money, and compared to the naive viewer numbers of old, the answer isn’t pretty. You can probably thank these insights for the more modern forms of product placement and indeed the nature of programming.
How does that work?
I vaguely recall being solicited to become a Nielsen household once. That was :dubious:
For my entire adult life, I’ve lived alone (except very briefly with some roommates), and I’ve never watched TV very much, and never owned one.
Some Nielsen family I’d make. :smack:
Our family did the Nielsen rating thing for TV back in the late 1990’s. Went on for 3 months I think.
From something I read: There’s a camera on the set-top box, watching the room from the TV’s point of view. A program running in the set-top box counts the number of faces. Somewhere between your iPhone camera’s face detector and a Kinect.
Can we get a cite for this? Sounds awfully urban-legendary.
If Nielsen is relevant for no other reason, they are relevant for sending me something like $30 for filling out their stuff for a week.
I think the word you are looking for is “whoosh”.
I think there has been some effort at an AI style recognition device, but nothing has been deployed. The rating box that seems to be usually deployed is much more simple. A very low tech box with a set of buttons on top. When you get the box you agree to log your movements in and out of the TV viewing room. Everyone in the household has a button on the box. So, if you do slip out into the kitchen, you hit your button on the way out. There are arguments about the level of compliance, and the box can’t tell how much notice you take, but if you are in the room you log your presence. That plus information snarfed from the set top box is the data set.
I would imagine that they very likely set up some more sophisticated tracking systems for a small subset of the surveyed households, so that they can get a better grasp on compliance, and thus provide some correction factors.
Are you sure the entire digital spectrum isn’t being sent, but only the current channel is being tuned/decoded locally in the home? For example, I have Comcast/Xfinity, and my DVR box can record two channels at once. Does this mean two digital streams are initiated from the Comcast mothership, or are two digital tuners simply decoding two streams from entire bandwidth sent to my home? I would have guessed to latter, but never really thought about it much.
On the contrary, I would imagine for accurate results they would need to know about people like you also.
If somebody who rarely watches TV then does watch a particular programme, well, thats the type of information advertisers really want to know about.
Your set-top box might not be able to know whether your TV is in use, but your TV certainly does, and some TVs can and do compile a log of what you’re watching and automatically send it to the manufacturer:
It’s certainly conceivable that the manufacturer might sell or share this data with Nielsen, TV networks, or other third parties.