Measuring TV viewership in an unplugged world

A commercial from AT&T touts how you can watch the same program simultaneously on TV, PC and cell phone.  Add podcasts to the equation and you can see why the people at Nielsen Media Research have their work cut out for them.  It’s one thing to measure the network TV viewing habits of some 40,000 homes where the TVs are wired to report back to Nielsen. It’s an entirely different story when you try to measure what people watch on handheld devices or from people’s computers streaming network TV shows.

According to a story The Changing Art of measuring TV viewership by Phil Hochmuth, 90% of TV viewing still happens at home, but it’s the other 10% that networks and marketing types are desperate to delve into.

According to Hochmuth, such demand is changing the way Nielsen collects and process its ratings numbers, which drive TV advertising and programming worth an estimated $70 billion, and determine what “soars and bombs” in the high-stakes network programming line ups.

Nielsen’s traditional measurement tool, the set-top box or People Meter, is evolving, in part due to complexity of home electronics and time-shifting digital video recorders (DVRs). Nielsen and TV broadcasters now employ technical techniques such as psychoacoustic encoding and passive signatures to create digital fingerprints which can be tracked, potentially even with mobile video users. Other gadgets in the works include the Go Meter and Solo Meter, which record psychoacoustic codes played on hand-held devices and store them in flash memory.

All this data is leaving some at Nielsen thinking that they’ll need a quantum leap in data storage and processing horsepower.

And that just might mean more job security for them thanks to users’ 24/7 “watch it anywhere at anytime” habits.