Just so you know, television ratings translate to advertising dollars. It was of no small importance when ratings began to include metered markets, where instead of diaries, so brainiac decided that since ratings were notoriously inaccurate as they were once computed technology could could figure out exactly what the tv viewer was watching without his help.
Its complicated but to be accurate TV stations had to purchase Nielsen Audio Video Encoders (NAVEs) so that Nielsen could tell one station signal from another. So now a fair number of cities are metered and "lo and behold" ratings are dropping like a rock. That means less ad revenue or, better put, the same amount of ad revenue just divided up more ways.
It is about accuracy and diversity and when folks decry the supposed decrease in TV viewing a lot of it can be explained by prior "over-estimating" of the viewing audience and the more choices available to viewers including nearly everything being available online.
Read the article and think about how things are now, two years after the writing.
Its complicated but to be accurate TV stations had to purchase Nielsen Audio Video Encoders (NAVEs) so that Nielsen could tell one station signal from another. So now a fair number of cities are metered and "lo and behold" ratings are dropping like a rock. That means less ad revenue or, better put, the same amount of ad revenue just divided up more ways.
It is about accuracy and diversity and when folks decry the supposed decrease in TV viewing a lot of it can be explained by prior "over-estimating" of the viewing audience and the more choices available to viewers including nearly everything being available online.
Read the article and think about how things are now, two years after the writing.