Very interesting article in the Miami Herald about a local company called erinMedia. The company has a product which analizes viewing habits taken from your cable box, passing it thru a sofisticated program and churning out all kinds of information. Like for example being able to tell at what time the audience for a perticular show began to decline.
For the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale market Nielsen ratings currently use so called diaries, where every member of the household records on a paper diary what they watched and how long they watched it. Which if you ask me is annoying considering how much these people get paid. And then you have all the channels a person could watch so you can imagine how much information gets omited. There is however new kind of tech from Nielsen called LPM or Local People Meters who’ve been deployed at the top 5 markets in the country with an expected rollout at several other, but it won’t make it to Miami-Ft.Lauderdale anytime soon.
erinMedia claims their technology is superior because it gathers the information straight from the cable box, as opposed to Nielsen’s LMP which requires everyone to wear a pager-like device and push a button to log in the system before their viewing habits are tracked.
WSVN which in the past has boycotted Nielsen for gelling english station ratings with Spanish is not too thrilled about the Nielsen LPM system. Bob Leider, executive VP of Sunbeam Television says in the article that LMPs lead to drop in audience share because the viewer has to be logged in the Nielsen LPM system before his viewing habits are taken into account.
Some interesting stats from the article: Miami- Ft. Lauderdale has 500 households participating in the ratings tracking for the 1.5 million households. Local TV stations pay Nielsen $50,000 a month for access to the ratings results which are issued daily. LPMs would cost three times that. Ouch! That’s $150,000 a month.
Miami Herald
Firm challenges Nielsen with new TV-ratings tool
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