Anybody know?
A friend got one installed recently, and he want’s to know how they work to track what he’s watching. The installer said something about hooking it up to speakers?
I just finshed three years as a Nielsen house. Basically, the people meter tracks what signals are going to the TV. If you are watching Broadcast TV, cable or satallite it can track what channel you are watching. If you are using another input (DVD, game console, VCR, etc.) it can track what type of equipment it is but not what that equipment is doing. (ie. it knows you are watching a DVD, but not which DVD you have in) The equipment does hook up to the left speaker. This tracks when you mute the sound to track patterns. (ie. do you mute during commercials)
We were a ratings household for a while, about five years ago, and never had a box or anything connected. We just filled out a form, got paid a few bucks for doing it. Was this not Nielsen?
That’s Nielsen, just not Nielsen-box Nielsen.
It likely was. Nielsen does two separate sorts of “surveys”.
- The “set meter” (i.e., the electronic box). One other thing that the set meter will “record” is viewing of a program which has been recorded on the household’s DVR, and then viewed at a later time.
There are also “people meters”. Individuals within the household are encouraged to “log in” and “log out”, so that the box can measure specifically who is watching a particular program.
The meters run continuously (i.e., throughout the year), and are the primary source for Nielsen’s ratings. There are several thousand households with meters, scattered throughout the U.S., and carefully chosen so that the total sample, as a whole, is reasonably representative of the total U.S.
- The paper diary. This is less precise, because, frankly, the respondent could misremember, or just flat out lie (“no way am I putting down that we watched ‘Jersey Shore’…that’s just embarrassing!”). However, it’s also far cheaper to have people do a week, or a month of a paper diary, than to set up those households with meters.
Nielsen uses the paper diaries during four month-long periods over the course of the year; these periods have become known as “sweeps months” (they’re typically during November, February, May, and July). During those periods, they distribute the diaries to hundreds of thousands of households. This lets Nielsen gather data across a far larger population, and thus lets Nielsen cut the data up into more discrete segments. For example, there aren’t enough “meter” households in all but the largest markets for Nielsen to be able to show market-level ratings information; using the diary information lets Nielsen provide market-level ratings for all of the TV markets in the U.S.
Because everyone knows that the ratings will be more closely scrutinized during “sweeps months”, the networks tend to make certain that they run their strongest programming during those periods. So, you’ll nearly always see first-run episodes during sweeps months, for example.
The way mine works is:
Leslie Nielsen calls me up pretty much randomly and asks what I’m watching. Then I holler the name of the show into the speakers.
If Leslie’s on a movie shoot or on vacation, it’s Brigitte Nielsen who calls.
Huh. I have Connie Nielsen call me. She’s very nice.