By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily
My roommates and I have been chosen (if we choose to accept it,) to be a Nielsen family. And while, at first, I was thrilled to finally get the opportunity to stand up and be counted (I’m a fan of more cancelled series than I can count – Firefly, Brisco County Jr., Wonderfalls, The Critic, Futurama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Arrested Development, Farscape, The Tick, Justice League Unlimited…) it got me thinking about how, exactly, Nielsen is going to get accurate data on their version of “network performance.”
First of all, my “Nielsen Family” consists of three roommates, including myself, who share a four bed, four-bath condo. I’ve never seen Patrick watch television. Ever. Mike supposedly watches TV but I’ve never seen him actually pay attention to it – preferring to leave it humming in the background to help him concentrate while he plays Warcraft III or Diablo II.
As for me, well, that’s the stickiest of wickets. I own a TV but I only use it for my PS2 and Wii hookups. While Nielsen can track what people watch on TiVo brand PVR boxes, I’m not sure they’ll be able to track my setup, which consists of a P4 Dell repurposed into a MythTV on Ubuntu box. The MythTV box connects directly to a business-class projector, but I end up using it mostly for DVD movies, YouTube, and downloaded videos. Even when I watch MythTV recorded movies, I usually end up doing so from my bedroom, which can access the MythTV box and stream the videos (and live TV!) over the LAN in the condo.
(Continued…)
If they put the monitoring device in between the MythTV box’s TV card and the wall, it’ll pick up some automatic recordings that I don’t watch – or don’t watch more than a few minutes of. For example, I automatically record every “Simpsons” episode that comes across the airwaves, but if it’s an early-season one or two episode, I’ll delete it after just a few seconds. (I’m just about the only person in the world that believes that the Simpsons got better with age.) Similarly, I’ve got the BBC News recorded in the mornings, but I rarely ever watch it. I also record Keith Olbermann, but more often than not, I’ll see what stories he’s covering at the beginning of the broadcast, and I’ll already be informed on them because a good part of my job is keeping up with the news. There’s almost always a few stories – most stories, in fact, that I’d fast-forward through.
The only way to cut through this would be to meticulously fill out diaries explaining what I watched, and I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle when the only benefit is that I might be able to help “Who Wants To Be A Superhero” – one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen yet one of the most intelligent things on prime-time TV remaining – avoid an ignominious fate. (I don’t mind stupidity on television. It’s stupidity that puts on a pretense of being smart that I mind. WWTBAS is silly-stupid and revels in it.)
And of course, the fact that MythTV’s skip-forward feature allows me to completely ignore commercials makes the whole Nielsen system kind of moot anyway.
On the other hand, if I do pass this up, I’m pretty sure they won’t find people like us – geeks – in the next Nielsen family on the list. Which probably means yet another season of reality TV shows and dumbed-down entertainment. Maybe those shows aren’t what most of America watches. Maybe those shows are just what most of the people who don’t use quite as much technology watch.
So either way, the Nielsen system is flawed. It just doesn’t work in the age of time-shifting, commercial skipping, downloading, torrenting, netflixing TV-on-DVDing, technological advancement. Nielsen, like all companies, needs to adapt or die.
Particularly because, while HDTV has all the attention right now, we’re reaching an age, with compression algorithms and broadband possibilities (and, if Net Neutrality is defeated, QoS policies for streaming media) where we can theoretically deliver TV-over-IP. And if so, deep packet inspection can tell Nielsen exactly what people are watching, when they’re watching it, possibly how much of it they’re watching, what commercials they skip, etc., by tracking it centrally instead of having a large number of interceptors from the “client” TVs. Maybe that’s the way things are going.
Maybe it’s not.
The point is, that if you’re in any type of business that quantifies anything – whether network monitoring TCP or CBS – you have to keep up with the changes in technology and the new ways of doing things.
No comments yet.