MattSnodBlog

No, not that Nielsen. The Nielsen Company recently announced that they will be integrating online video viewership into its traditional television viewership measurement. This is a valiant effort, if not three years too late.

For one, Nielsen has long been criticized for its less-than-accurate ratings system. I recall heated discussions within Rysher Entertainment (remember them?) when we'd get the overnight ratings back on Entertainment Tonight that varied greatly from the national ratings we'd get a few days later. Further, their sampling size is still grossly underrepresented. With only 25,000 Nielsen "metered market" households representing 114,500,000 U.S. households, 97.8% of American households have no input into what is actually being watched. (Note- I didn't cite the Wikipedia entry here, because I wrote it.) Now Nielsen's plan is to introduce Internet meters in 7,500 of its metered homes. This brings the percentage of online U.S. households not represented to 99.11%. (Calculation note- 74.1% of the U.S. population is online.)

What this means is that television ratings, commercials, brands you see, Christmas ideas, movie openings, auto financing deals, and billions of TV advertising dollars are being decided by data from an incredibly few number of people.

This shortcoming was put best to me by my old boss at Rysher Entertainment. She said that she and her colleague, who were completely different people with completely different TV viewing habits, were seen as equals in Nielsen's eye, simply because they were both caucasian women, mothers, 35-54, in the New York metro region.

The big "however" here is, Nielsen's the only game in town. Literally billions of dollars ride on what they report. And they're doing a pretty darn good job keeping this industry afloat, considering the astronomical costs of running a service like theirs. Imagine if, next April, they said, "Well screw you, then. Figure it out on your own during May sweeps!"

Today marks the day that U.S. broadcasters will need to shut off their analog broadcast transmitters. More specifically, they have until 12:01 a.m. tomorrow morning (coincidentally the same time as the Facebook vanity URL availability). It's been a nice run for a media transmission method that's lasted since 1928.

There are still an estimated millions of TV viewers (many elderly and poor) who are still unprepared for today's switch to digital TV transmissions. For those users with cable TV, satellite TV, fiber delivery, or <2-year-old TVs with digital tuners, this won't be an issue -- business as usual. But for those who still use their old tube televisions with an antenna, the forecast calls for snow.

What I would hope to see is something very smart that DirecTV does. I wish that cable and fiber providers would eliminate the standard-definition channels in lieu of their high-def equivalents. For instance, Comcast and Verizon have channel 4 (NBC affiliate in New York City) and channel 504 (high-def digital channel for WNBC) in their channel line-up. However, DirecTV has a menu option whereby you can opt to not show the standard-definition version of WNBC-TV and use their "channel 4" to display WNBC-DT (aka channel 4.1) only. I guess we'll see what happens tomorrow.

So my prediction for tomorrow is that millions of old people will be headed to Radio Shack tomorrow to pick up their digital converter boxes that they should have gotten 4 months ago, and millions of young people will be whining about Facebook on Twitter.