Nielsen Media Research is getting ready to begin measuring the habits of PVR-owning households next week. Until now,
the company didn't know what was recorded and watched later, assuming everything was watched live. Of course, viewing
habits have changed with TiVo and other PVRs.I've written on this topic (here and here) a couple times already, but I thought some of the details in two recent articles might be of some interest to our hardcore readers. You can read more here and here.
So now Nielsen will gradually add households that own PVRs. It'll only add 100 homes the first week, until it reaches the point where the number of households reflects the overall percentage of PVR ownership. Some say it'll be a year before ratings are affected by the new PVR measurement system. It shows the new influence of PVRs, if nothing else.
1. Actually, the statement in the first paragraph is not true. I was a Nielsen household for one month about 10 years ago (they have a small number of permanent households and thousands of rotating ones that change frequently). At the time, we had to check off whether we watched a program live, or videotaped it (this was pre-DVR days) and watched it later.
So they DO track whether programs are watched in real-time or not, though they probably have not, until now, made a distinction between PVRs and other kinds of delayed viewing.
Posted at 5:26PM on Dec 22nd 2005 by Keith