NYTimes.com: A New Ratings System Stirs Up the Fall TV Season

hiake · Oct 10, 2007

A New Ratings System Stirs Up the Fall TV Season

Two weeks into the fall television season, broadcast networks are ensnared in familiar fights over ratings points and demographics. But this year, two new developments have removed much of the meaning from overnight ratings.

One, the increasing use of the digital video recorder, has led to the other: ratings for commercials.

DVR owners like Sara Morrison, a 26-year-old from Los Angeles, are making audience measurement harder for Nielsen Media Research, the company that calculates audiences for networks and advertisers.

“I normally don’t even pay attention to the time slots shows are on,” Ms. Morrison said last week. She almost always fast-forwards through commercials, and because she can record all her favorite comedies and dramas, she hardly ever stumbles upon new shows.

Ms. Morrison’s habits are not commonplace, at least not yet. Most television viewing still occurs live, even in DVR-equipped households, according to Nielsen. But the striking rise in DVR ownership — to 20 percent last month from 9 percent in September 2006 — is permanently altering the television playing field.

Since January 2006, Nielsen has been estimating the number of people who watch specific shows with a DVR. Now concerns about DVR users like Ms. Morrison who fast-forward through commercials have led Nielsen to begin reporting the average audience for the commercials in a given show, including commercials seen via DVR. This data provides a more accurate assessment of an advertisement’s reach than traditional program ratings, which tell only how many people saw a program.

But the two sets of ratings have created considerable confusion for networks and advertising agencies, mostly because obtaining the commercial data takes longer than getting the traditional viewing ratings.

Most of the advertiser deals made during the May sales period were based, for the first time, on commercial ratings, which will include three days of DVR playback. Those ratings for the first week of the fall season will not be available until Oct. 16.

“We now have to wait 15 days for time-shifted data and 21 days for commercial plus three days of DVR viewing. And that’s if there are no processing delays at Nielsen — a very big if,” said Steve Sternberg, the senior vice president for Magna Global, a media agency of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

Overnight program ratings continue to serve as snapshots of show performance for media reports and network promotions, and they do include same-day DVR viewership. But because they no longer represent the costs for advertisements, they are less relevant than before.

The guaranteed audience for the program and for the ads “were the same before. Now they’re not,” said David Poltrack, the head of research for CBS.

The broadcast networks, in their daily ratings reports, now add caveats about DVR usage and commercial ratings delays. But Preston Beckman, the executive in charge of scheduling for Fox, dismissed suggestions that the new ratings make it impractical to judge the fall lineups yet.

“We have a pretty good idea about what shows are successful and what shows are failing,” he said; the overnight ratings provide directional cues.

Some shows benefit more from DVR use than others. Live programs like “Sunday Night Football” and “American Idol” record relatively little playback, while series like “Desperate Housewives,” “Heroes” and “Grey’s Anatomy” sometimes gain an entire ratings point when DVRs are taken into account.

The effects are bound to become more apparent as DVR use grows. Mr. Poltrack cited data from CBS’s 14 owned-and-operated stations for the Sept. 24 season premiere of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, the half-hour comedy delivered a 2.7 rating on its original broadcast date. After seven days of DVR viewing, the show had earned a 4.1 rating, an increase of 52 percent.

The local data are not representative of national trends because the CBS stations are in urban markets where DVR use is more prevalent. Still, it suggests that the habits of time-shifting consumers are having a significant affect on television ratings. Mr. Poltrack expects the DVR data to raise the ratings of some shows 10 percent or more.

According to Nielsen, about half of DVR users play back shows on the same night as the original broadcast. And an independent CBS survey of viewers, conducted the first two weeks of the fall season, suggests certain nights of the week are becoming popular playback periods.

On Sept. 28, the night after the season premiere of “CSI,” the program was the second-most-watched show among the 1,349 members in a CBS survey who owned DVRs. It beat every program actually showing on Friday except for “Numb3rs.” The third-most-watched show was “Grey’s Anatomy,” which had its debut opposite “CSI” the previous evening, Mr. Poltrack said.

“The heavy amount of playback on Friday is a combination of the popularity of the Thursday night programs and the fact that people have more time because of the weekend,” he said.

The observation gives credence to Nielsen’s estimate that 90 percent of recorded shows are watched within three days.

“The good news is they’re still watching,” Mike Mellon, the senior vice president for research at ABC, said. “We’re not seeing viewing go down at all. We’re just seeing it in different ways.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/business/media/08ratings.html
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Hmmmm, I need to share this news to those who record my shows for me -tongue2 I am actually contributing to rating points -lol

But really, many of us migrated over to downloads already right?

[N] · Oct 10, 2007

i rarely record tv shows, only when i'm too busy to watch my favorite show lol, but this breaks the television ratings system lol...

NYTimes.com: A New Ratings System Stirs Up the Fall TV Season

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin

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