Tuesday, December 20, 2005

This will tell networks what people are actually watching.

NEW YORK — Starting next week, the company that measures what people watch on television will also follow what they record on digital video recorders to watch later.

The move by Nielsen Media Research is a reflection of how the traditional notion of watching TV is changing. And if Nielsen’s numbers show that new technology is also changing what people are watching, it has the potential to profoundly disrupt a multibillion-dollar business.

An estimated 7 percent of the nation’s 110 million homes with televisions now have digital video recorders, and that’s expected to rise to one quarter of the TV population by sometime in 2007, Nielsen said.

[...]

It has taken this long partly because the Nielsen “people meters” that record what families are watching weren’t equipped to handle DVRs, she said.

The company’s new “active/passive meters” can, however. And with the help of a code embedded in a program by the television networks, they can tell when something that has been recorded is actually watched. They even know when people fast-forward through commercials.

[...]

But since people with DVRs tend to watch more television than people without them, the data also may help smaller, cult favorites. Tests revealed that the WB’s “Smallville,” for example, was watched at double the rate in DVR homes than in homes without the device.

This might have saved a show like Firefly. This is good for good television.