New ‘Passive’ People Meter in the Works : Nielsen Developing a ‘Passive’ Audience-Measurement System

Three years from now, a new TV ratings device could be watching you watch television.

But it won’t be Big Brother time, officials of Nielsen Media Research emphasized Wednesday in announcing an agreement with the David Sarnoff Research Center to jointly develop and test a new “passive” audience measurement system that involves a cameralike device in the subject’s home.

“We would use this technology only in households where people had agreed to have the technology installed,” John A. Dimling, Nielsen executive vice president, told a news conference here.

“We’re not scanning the room to find out what they’re doing,” he added, only identifying, on a “second-by-second” basis, who is watching what program and when.

If the technology, methodology and value for cost proves feasible, he said, the new system could start replacing the people-meter ratings technology three years from now.

“If everything goes well, that’s our goal--to have a passive system for measuring television audiences” that would replace the current system, Dimling said.

He declined to say how much the new project will cost.

Officials at the three major TV networks said that Nielsen was to outline the proposal for them later this week. But their initial response was cool.

“I think that the ‘if all goes well’ is a big if,” said Barry Cook, NBC vice president for media research. “Because there’s a lot more to an audience measurement system than a technology.”

Nielsen’s people-meter system, now used in 4,000 households, became the industry standard in the fall of 1987. It is an “active” system in that individual viewers must log on by pushing designated buttons on small boxes by their TV set.

Costing NBC, CBS and ABC $5 million a year each, the people-meters replaced a passive “audimeter” system that simply recorded what programs were being viewed. The people-meter system was an effort to measure more precisely the numbers and kinds of viewers watching TV.

Its first year of operation resulted in an overall 9% drop in audience size that the networks partly attributed to the new technology.

The proposed new “image recognition” system would use a computer and cameralike device in each participating household. The facial features of each family member or friend would be stored in the computer, officials said. Then, when the TV set was turned on, the cameralike device atop the set would start scanning the room, identifying who was watching by matching what it sees with the stored computer data, and then cataloguing them in Nielsen’s national tally.

If the camera-computer didn’t “recognize” who was watching, it simply would record the viewer as a “visitor.”

Dr. Curtis R. Carlson, a research director at the Sarnoff facility in Princeton, N.J., conceded at Wednesday’s news conference that much still must be worked out with the new system. Asked how the system would differentiate between twins, for example, he said, “Twins are hard.”

Despite Dimling’s assurances that there are no Big Brother aspects to the viewer-scanning system, some unease was expressed by network officials.

“We would be uncomfortable with that,” said CBS research vice president Michael Eisenberg. “But I’d have to hear more about it.”

Viewers might also be uncomfortable with it, NBC’s Cook noted, saying that if the system were used in every room in a house that has a TV set, including the bedroom, “people may want to throw a coat over the camera, so to speak.”

NBC always has championed passive audience measurement systems that require nothing of the viewer, Cook said, but Nielsen’s proposal for one that watches the viewer watching TV will itself require a long, hard look.

“It remains to be seen whether something which is so potentially invasive as a camera--which identifies you in the room--is going to change the viewer behavior,” he said.