Can I affect televison ratings? I think it works something like polling, in that there’s a random sample of the population used to generate data. Nielsen (and maybe other companies, too) picks it’s participants, issues them little recorder box thingies, and has them watch whatever they would normally. Some participants may be asked to keep a diary of TV watching as well. Fine and good.
However, I’m not a Nielsen participant. I do have a fancy digital cable box that sits on the TV. I know it has some ability to communicate, because I can use it to order PPV stuff–I select a program, click the “buy” button, and the program starts on my TV. Obviously, there’s a record of what I ordered–this is how I get billed for ordering a UFC event or whatever. Can this same cable box report my non-ppv watching habits for ratings or other purposes? If the present box can’t do it, it seems like the technology already exists and should be fairly simple to add to the box…would that run Neilsen out of business?
I have often wondered the same thing. In fact, the info from the cable box can be mined in a whole lot of ways that were impossible when the Nielsens were simply a handwritten record of which shows I watched. The cable box can supply second-by-second data of how many sets are on each channel. This means that they can see how many people left a certain show two minutes into it, or three minutes into it, or eleven minutes in. This can teach the programming department a lot about how long we’ll put up with a bad show before giving up. It can also teach the commercial-makers the same thing: which commercials entertain us, and which make us flick the channel. And so on.
Yes, they can (and to some extent do) monitor a lot of what you are watching but not all data is information.
The biggest problem is that many people leave their cable box on and their TV off when they are done watching. So did you really just watch NBC Must See Thursday, the local news, The Tonight Show, etc. or did you turn off the TV after The Office and did something else?
My cable company, to get around this, now* puts the cable box into a black screen mode if you don’t change anything on the cable box for a while (e.g., change channel). This might seem like a “screen saver” effect but remember it’s not their TV.
(There is also remarkably little difference between “on” and “off” mode on the cable box. The switched plug follows the on-off, but a lot of TVs lose their settings when unplugged for a while as well as most people like instant-on for their TVs.)
In our case though, the majority of what we watch I tape off the old analog signal. OTOH, our 2nd highest percentage is free on-demand, which is utterly trivial to track.
*Our boxes routinely get remotely reprogrammed. Every now and then all the color schemes, menu effects and so on change. The customer has no choice in these changes of course.
So who gets the data? I’m not thrilled with the invasion of my privacy, but that’s an argument better suited for GD. For the purpose of discussion in GQ, do the TV stations get info on what local cable subscribers are watching? Does it supplement the “official” ratings?
My cable system has two Fox stations. One of them always carries the Saints game, and the other one carries “other regional coverage”. If it makes a difference in terms of advertising revenue or anything, I’d be inclined to “reward” the station that shows my beloved New Orleans Saints by viewing that station whenever I watch Fox–which is mostly for sports anyway.
1). While the cable boxes are technically capable of retrieving this information, they do not. I write the software for such boxes and we do not put code like that in there, probably because…
2). Most stations have a contract with Nielson, they pay Nielson much money to use their data. If they don’t pay, they can’t use Nielson numbers to set their ad rates. Why would they pay for this data from somewhere else that they can’t even use to set their ad rates?