New Audience Measurement Device Tested

Tracking couch potatoes in their natural habitat is big business for television networks and their advertisers.

But the broadcast industry’s problem is how to track a notoriously passive audience without asking viewers to do hard work, such as flipping switches and keeping diaries--hallmarks of the age-old Nielsen ratings system now in place.

Enter the “personal people meter,” a new system being tested by radio ratings powerhouse Arbitron Inc., which offers to revolutionize the way the country’s TV viewership is measured by allowing survey participants to simply sit back and surf.

“In research, the nirvana is a passive measurement system--a system that’s the least intrusive in interfering with the reality you’re trying to measure,” said Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC. “The reason this is exciting is that it’s the first methodological improvement that’s both viable and available.”

The current Nielsen system, whose roots go back to when families sat around each night to watch their favorite shows, was developed before cable TV, the Internet and high-tech home video games all vied for attention.

Arbitron plans to spend $100million on a next-generation measurement system, which is being tested in Philadelphia, employing devices that participants wear all day, like pagers.

A device picks up special audio signals--outside the human hearing range--that tells it what TV and radio stations the participant is watching or listening to throughout the day. Users then go home each night and upload the information over their computers to Arbitron’s central database.

The personal people meter, as Arbitron calls the device, would replace the current system developed in the 1950s that relies on participants flipping switches on and off on set-top boxes in their homes and keeping diaries of what they watch.

Such activities require a high degree of participation, which means people are more likely to skew results when they forget to record what shows they watched, critics say.

“It’s no surprise to anyone in the television business that the TV diary is stretched,” Arbitron spokesman Thom Mocarsky said. “Suffice it to say it’s a pretty daunting document to fill out.”

Mocarsky said niche shows that run on cable networks may often get left out of diaries in households where many members follow their own shows.

Thus, not surprisingly, the Philadelphia field test that followed 200 to 300 people over the last year found that overall cable viewership was more than double using the portable people meters from what it was using the Nielsen diary system.

The discrepancy was much smaller for network television, where viewership using the portable people meter reading was marginally higher than the Nielsen rating.

In the next phase of testing, which begins in January, Arbitron will expand its pool of participants to about 1,500 throughout Philadelphia. If the results prove favorable, the number of participants could be stepped up to as many as 5,000 and a system that produces commercially available data could be ready by year-end.

Arbitron hopes to have as many as 100 markets covered by 2008.

Arbitron says it wants to bring Nielsen on board and would like to make the system--which has cost more than $20 million to develop--part of a new joint venture that would require additional investment of about $100 million by 2008, Mocarsky said.

Nielsen has invested some money in the new system, although the company will not say how much, spokeswoman Karen Kratz said. “We’re keeping this as a viable option for us,” she said.