Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Television

Who's Watching What on TV? Who's To Say? (nytimes.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the nobody-knows dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Who's Watching What on TV? Who's To Say? More

Who's Watching What on TV? Who's To Say?

Comments Filter:
  • It's none of anyone else's business what I'm watching on the TV that I own.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You own a TV? First mistake...

      • Re:"Who's Watching What on TV?" (Score:5, Funny)

        by Torodung ( 31985 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @04:27PM (#65197285) Journal

        ...and there's "I don't even own a TV" guy. Thank you. I was expecting it to be first post.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          ...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)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:36PM (#65197127) Journal

    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)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:49PM (#65197163)

      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.

    • They sent me one to list what music I listened to for a week since between radio, satellite, and internet there's probably no better way. But the only reason anyone cares is for advertising rates and the advertisers want to know if they can trust the numbers they're given or if they're made up Facebook nonsense metrics. When the services were staying ad free it wasn't as important other than knowing what would drive subscriptions.

    • Come on now, $100 doesn't even cover the cost of subscriptions people forgot to unsubscribe from.

    • 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.

      • Neilson locomotives missed out by virtue of being a train company that went defunct in the 1960s.

        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.
    • Nelson did no such thing. All he wanted to do was nuke the whales.
    • My mom was a Neilsen household from maybe 1990s through 2005. The TV was modified with a small coaxial cable that plugged into a box with power and phone line connection. It would phone (toll free) the mother ship around 3 AM daily. When the TV failed, they brought and gave her a new one. I suspect that her diligent attention to Tiger Woods golf, had a significant positive effect on his marketability.
    • So a while ago video game magazines went away. But it wasn't that big a while ago they last a lot longer than you'd think. About till 2006 or so.

      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)

    by aldousd666 ( 640240 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @04:52PM (#65197327) Journal
    Since there's server logs of literally everything that crosses the wire somewhere, they should have this data unless they're deliberately not collecting it. Or is the problem they have in attributing it to a particular person or differentiating it from 'this just came on when the last thing was over' ? (Seems like that latter problem would also apply to Nielsen boxes on regular old TVs before streaming)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

  • I worked at overture which invented the idea of pay for performance advertising. we had a system of paying for clicks. if a person clicked on an ad then the advertiser was paid. it was very easy. then later it was obfuscated. I think that might have happened at Google and other places because if you can keep people in the dark about how the ads are affecting their business then you can say more clever things about how the ads are helping. and with television it's even less clear so you can make up all kinds

  • 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.

    • 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.
      Wonder how many porn screencaps they get :D

      • 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

  • 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 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • They have vans that definitively can help up with counting who's watching TV

  • Their metrics are lies (Score:3)

    by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 ) on Thursday February 27, 2025 @04:04AM (#65198213)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kjshark ( 312401 )

      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?

  • Stream most of stuff to computer, sometimes....stream sports it to TV !

Slashdot Top Deals

If it has syntax, it isn't user friendly.

Close