Posted: August 24, 2009 | 17:09 ET
File Under: Television | Measurement



How many people watch a given show? For decades, advertisers have relied on Nielsen ratings for the answer. Today, however, several research firms--Nielsen among them--are eyeing the rich stores of data collected by digital set-top boxes.

STB measurement promises to reveal much more about the habits of TV audiences--and account for many more of their members. Nevertheless, the practice must overcome a number of hurdles before it's adopted as an industry standard.

"Mining audience data from STB devices that deliver TV content via cable or satellite is turning into the digital equivalent of the Alaska gold rush," Katy Bachman writes in a recent Adweek article.

At the same time, Nielsen maintains that STB measurement faces "technological, methodological and financial" challenges.

For instance, "the internal workings of the cable boxes differ system to system, but there are also multiple generations deployed within each system. That leads to a long list of issues that need to be addressed, not the least of which is figuring out if the TV set attached to the box is on or off. According to Nielsen, 10 percent of STBs never get turned off over any month-long period; about 30 percent of boxes remain on for 24 hours on any given day.

"Signal latency is also a tough challenge. Households that have multiple TV sets know all too well that two sets tuned to the same channel are never in sync. 'If the lag is five, 10 or 15 seconds, that's a lifetime for an ad,' says Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer for Turner Broadcasting...

"Perhaps at the top of the list of challenges is finding a way to capture demographics. None of the STB systems can directly measure viewing beyond the household level. 'This is very hard stuff and very hard to do,' says Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development for NBC Universal. 'These companies have been asking subscribers to foot the bill for the research and development. They all have strengths and weaknesses. It's a shame you can't put them all together. This is like the first flight of the Wright brothers'...

"At the end of the day, it's difficult to imagine a set-top box service without panel measurement or mathematical modeling to fill in the demographic blanks." And that's before the industry's figured out a way to get actual access to the cable systems' data.

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