Who's Watching What on TV? Who's To Say? (nytimes.com) 45
An anonymous reader shares a report: People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways -- with an antenna, on cable, in an app or from a website, as well as live, recorded or on demand -- that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership. In some cases, media executives and advertisers are even uncertain whether a competitor's show is a hit or something well short of that.
The scramble to sort out a suitable solution began nearly a decade ago, as Netflix rose to prominence. It has only intensified since. "It is more chaotic than it's ever been," said George Ivie, the chief executive of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog. For decades, there was no dispute -- Nielsen's measurement was the only game in town.
But things started to go sideways after the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Nielsen had no ability -- at least at first -- to measure how many people clicked play on those apps. The streamers, of course, knew exactly how many people were watching on their own service but they either selectively disclosed some data or did not bother releasing it at all.
Over the past two years, as nearly all the major streaming services have introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the data they release makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. Netflix discloses what it calls "hours viewed" and "views" for its shows. Prime Video and Max prefer to describe how many million "viewers" watched a hit of their choosing. The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. Yet those figures, too, can lead to disagreements.
The scramble to sort out a suitable solution began nearly a decade ago, as Netflix rose to prominence. It has only intensified since. "It is more chaotic than it's ever been," said George Ivie, the chief executive of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog. For decades, there was no dispute -- Nielsen's measurement was the only game in town.
But things started to go sideways after the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Nielsen had no ability -- at least at first -- to measure how many people clicked play on those apps. The streamers, of course, knew exactly how many people were watching on their own service but they either selectively disclosed some data or did not bother releasing it at all.
Over the past two years, as nearly all the major streaming services have introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the data they release makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. Netflix discloses what it calls "hours viewed" and "views" for its shows. Prime Video and Max prefer to describe how many million "viewers" watched a hit of their choosing. The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. Yet those figures, too, can lead to disagreements.
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Was part of the resolution of that some form of lawsuit protection for past mis-reporting leading to underpayment of residuals? It seems to me like they were probably lying, or perhaps deliberately not tracking this data.
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One of the big SAG-AFTRA and WGA wins was access/release of this data. They know how many minutes every show has been streamed,
(FULL DISCLOSURE: I could be wrong here. My experience is now almost a decade in the past)
Your faith is touching, my son, but misplaced. From the at scale projects I've been involved with, log slip and drops are a "thing". About the only thing I'd bet more than a cup of java on is that the packet counts on the routers may keep up - but only because I didn't have an eye in that area so I'm guessing. In other projects, I know that even those counters are not more than 85% trustworthy once you start hitting ma
Re:This will become more transparent (Score:4, Informative)
Source: Worked for Nielsen as well as some mid-size streamers and handled analytic data capture.
"Who's Watching What on TV?" (Score:1, Offtopic)
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You own a TV? First mistake...
Re:"Who's Watching What on TV?" (Score:5, Funny)
...and there's "I don't even own a TV" guy. Thank you. I was expecting it to be first post.
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...and there's "I don't even own a TV" guy. Thank you. I was expecting it to be first post.
"I don't even own a TV" guy has been out smugged by the "I don't even have a wallet" guy.
I do own a TV but haven't used it for watching TV in years. It's mostly for playing an old Wii or occasionally hooking my laptop up to with my racing wheel. I watch most of my shit online these days like a normally maladjusted person.
The diary (Score:3)
Nelson used to have people keep a diary; back in the good old days when you just watched the TV and it did not watch you.
I don't understand how or why that survey method should not work now. Offer a few 1000 people in each of the major demographics your clients (advertisers, and media companies) care about $100 a month to write down what they watched for how long, on what and how.
Seems a lot easier than "boo hoo our spyware ^H^H^H^H^H telemetry isnt all encompassing enough"
Re:The diary (Score:4, Insightful)
When electronic tracking came about, Neilson found out those diaries were not at all accurate.
These days, ad placement is measured in clicks that lead to buys, and advertisers want info that's fairly specific to justify ad pricing.
Fundamentally, this is about advertisers wanting the most bang for their buck and media providers wanting the most bucks even if they have to deceive to do it.
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Come on now, $100 doesn't even cover the cost of subscriptions people forgot to unsubscribe from.
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Nelson used to have people keep a diary; back in the good old days when you just watched the TV and it did not watch you.
I don't understand how or why that survey method should not work now. Offer a few 1000 people in each of the major demographics your clients (advertisers, and media companies) care about $100 a month to write down what they watched for how long, on what and how.
Seems a lot easier than "boo hoo our spyware ^H^H^H^H^H telemetry isnt all encompassing enough"
Neilson missed out on the big data slurp as it kicked off, and now they're irrelevant. This may not be the last dying gasp of a once giant, but it's certainly looking like death spasms aren't far off.
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OTOH you could make an argument that Nelson Dairy is somehow missing out on the analyzing TV consumption data, but that should really be left to their parent company as they're more a brand now than a standalone company worried about marketing.
Re: Neilson locomotives (Score:2)
Wrong company.... Though the U.S. company doing the Neilson Ratings may well be accused of 'pulling a train'
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I suspect it's because they don't work (Score:3)
What changed was the big publishers in game companies like Nintendo and Sega and EA and Activision got a hold of good solid data models and big data in general so that they knew exactly how many sales they would get from printing a magazine ad and it was substantially less than the cost of the magazine ad. It had always been like that but they didn't have the d
I'm surprised (Score:3)
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Difficulty determining how many people are watching, or if anyone at all is watching and it's not just been left on auto-play. People leave the TV on for the dog sometimes, or just get up to do something and get distracted.
It's also a trade secret that they don't want to share, because the deep data informs how they select shows for greenlighting, renewing, and cancelling. Netflix clearly has some very strong data because they make decisions about shows within days of them being released.
it helps advertisers to keep things nebulous. (Score:2)
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Thanks for being a pioneer is helping to enshitify everything in our lives.
smart tvs (Score:2)
Smart TVs poll/capture screenshots at some interval, compress them and upload them to a bucket in the cloud where some clustering algorithms are applied to sort out what the user is seeing. Plus the TV's with user-facing cameras take snapshots of the user's faces and sends them up to another bucket in the cloud for processing by CNNs/deep learning to do facial sentiment analysis and correlate those to the timestamps on the clusters of things people watched. It's not that complicated.
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Not doubting you, but I just happened to be thinking about this very sort of thing as I was walking to work, and I just wondered if you could point to any particular brands or models (regions/countries?) of TV that does this. I have a Samsung that I've stuck behind PiHole on my network to block all it's incoming and outgoing 'telemetry', but I'd never considered it might be screen capturing too, even if I won't let it send on it's pretty pictures. :D
Wonder how many porn screencaps they get
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I haven't actually confirmed that any of this is actually happening on most smart TVs, but the ACR hardware is built into pretty much every smart streaming device. ACR was built to solve the problem of the ever-shifting streaming service landscape where no service has any obligation to share what they're showing users. Pattern matching on screen shots to determine what's on the screen is what ACR does mostly. Since the TVs don't have cameras mostly, they can only collect voice data if they're voice controll
Audio Watermarking (Score:1)
Nielsen uses audio watermarking, and a special microphone, to try determining what you are listening to, or at least they did a few years ago.
One of my friends was paid a stipend each month to wear a microphone clipped to his shirt, that tracked everything he watched.
I Can Say (Score:2)
I can say that I'm watching less streaming services and canceling any/all that introduce ads. I'm not paying for ads. I can get ads for free over the air.
I'm also canceling the price hikers.
I have no trouble finding low cost and free entertainment outside of streaming services. And all too often, it's higher quality than the dreck that the streaming services seem to think I'll accept.
I will say that I have enjoyed the Apple TV+ service that I got for Christmas. But, following regular use, the quality progra
What I'm watching (Score:1)
The Texan
Donna Reed
Wanted: Dead or Alive
Ironsides ( which is *really* good )
Elsbeth
High Potential
I also liked The Good Place and Ted Lasso.
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Oh, and "M-Squad" on Youtube. Lee Marvin. Some original plots I've never seen before. Some big movie starts (Like Charles Bronson, Leonard Nimoy, James Coburn) before they became big movie starts. But black and white and some prints are in poor shape.
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Glad you enjoyed it. It's had lots of plots we don't see today.
Partially because some of them are no longer possible with modern tech around.
Do a survey (Score:2)
Since "survey-answering" (likely) doesn't correlate with show-watching preference in any demographic.. just do a fucking survey of a few thousand people and ask them.
Just ask BBC (Score:2)
They have vans that definitively can help up with counting who's watching TV
Their metrics are lies (Score:3)
A friend works for a TV (both broadcast and streaming) station. Among other things, he makes the "splash screens" with the thumbnail of the show, for use in promotional material. He frequently gets asked to make splash screens for "trending now" shows, or "people are watching this" shows. The staff have access to real-time viewership numbers, which are pretty accurate for viewers who are using the app or streaming some other way.
So, my friend is asked by management to make some splash screens because certain shows are trending. He pulls the viewing stats and says "but these shows aren't popular. They are not trending, and nobody is watching them." The answer from management is that this is precisely the *point* of claiming a show is trending. - it has no basis in actual numbers, but it publicises a show and maybe it'll be more popular if it is heavily pushed.
I have no reason to believe the situation is any different for any other provider. If the organisation providing the content is telling you stats about who is watching, those stats are bullshit and intended purely to push the narrative that management endorses at the time.
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That explains a lot. Hulu shows the same things I've already chosen not to watch for weeks. How are the same five shows trending for a month weeks? Nothing new?
Hardly use a TV to watch stuff now..... (Score:2)
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I have this great idea for a new TV show. The premise is simple. Just toss a liberal celebrity into the ring with a couple of Marines, and spend about an hour filming him getting the living shit beat out of him. Wouldn't it be great, every night you can turn on your TV and watch some loathsome parasite like Gavin Newsom or Chuck Schumer getting a Front Street Face Lift? If that's not a hit, I don't know what is!
I'd prefer to see Trump and his cronies getting beaten to death with rotten wieners, but sure why not