# television ratings **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 26, 2003, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-ratings/150942 "2003-01-26T00:41:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![JoeyELP](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ac8455/32.png) [@JoeyELP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoeyELP)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2003, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-ratings/150942/1 "2003-01-26T00:41:11Z")
pretty quick, but I was just wondering. You hear about TV ratings all the time, but exactly how do they go about getting these ratings? I’ve heard about the neilson (sp?) ratings before, but who or what is Neilson? Are they just conducting a random survey and multiplying? On the more exotic tech-end, can the cable company actually see what the TVs at the end of the wire are doing? If that’s true, how do they figure this out for non-cable viewers? I used to have a thing we’d hook the cable line into, and it would transfer the signal to it’s counterpart in another room of the house that didn’t have a cable jack. Didn’t work too well, but if there really is some sort of magical tracing system, seems like that would make it pretty hard to see what I was watching. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2003, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-ratings/150942/2 "2003-01-26T02:31:38Z")
Try this > **[How Do Television Ratings Work?](https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question433.htm)** > > A show that has several million viewers may seem popular to us, but a network may need millions more watching that program to make it a financial success. How do they figure out how many people are watching a show?