Nielsen Rushes into PVR Time-Shift Reporting with 60-Home Sample

With 2 new sets of ratings -- including playbacks within a day and within a week of a show’s original broadcast -- atop traditional real time viewing data, broadcast, programming and advertising players will have even more figures to cherry-pick and spin in negotiations and publicity, Nielsen executives warned. Advertisers probably will focus on the old “live” ratings when introducing new products and on “live plus 7-day” figures -- which will capture replays within 168 hours of broadcast -- for messages that don’t have so much immediacy, said Pat McDonough, senior vp-planning, policy & analysis.

A journalist on a conference call expressed bewilderment about what numbers to report, asking about possible chaos as the new situation shakes out, and again when VoD numbers are added, as Nielsen promises starting in the spring for national ratings. Nielsen officials said clients can release the data they wish but the research firm will be available to help sort out problems. Communications Vp Karen Gyemisi suggested a focus on live plus 7-day ratings as the most useful numbers to report on weekly deadlines.

“Live plus 7-day” figures will reflect 90% of PVR use, said Nielsen Communications Vp Anne Elliot. These first will be released publicly Jan. 17, rather than the usual Monday, due to the Martin Luther King birthday holiday. “Live plus same day” ratings will include viewing by 3 a.m. of shows recorded on TiVos and cable and satellite boxes. These will be released first Jan. 4 to account for New Year’s but usually will be out Tuesdays. Nielsen started incorporating PVR use in most local market samples in April, Gyemisi said.

U.S. PVR penetration is relatively small at 7%; lumping in viewing of recordings probably won’t affect ratings much at first, since the most oft-recorded shows are typically the highest rated, Elliot said. Others have said PVRs could be in about 25% of homes by 2007, as cable firms and others more assertively market the devices, McDonough said.

But so eager are advertisers and broadcasters to get a better grip on PVR owners’ behavior that Nielsen felt obliged to start offering data based on only dozens of homes, said McDonough. She said Nielsen ordinarily samples no fewer than 150 homes to study new market developments, but even with the margin of error at first the numbers can be interesting anecdotally or for qualitative analysis. About 100 more PVR homes a month will be added until a nationally representative sample is reached around July, McDonough said.

Clients can study commercial-skipping from Nielsen’s minute-by-minute ratings breakdown, McDonough said.

PVR measurement has been a long time coming. In 2003, Nielsen offered clients the addition of live plus 7 day, with live plus same day to follow shortly, Eliot told us. But even when the firm modified that to offer flexibility on which of the 2 sets of PVR data would start first, clients asked that no such reporting start until live plus same day and live plus 7 day were both available, she said. Businesses feared the PVR numbers that came 2nd never would gain the importance of the preceding data set, Eliot said. No such data could be offered until clients tested and learned to use all aspects of Nielsen’s new active-passive meters, she said during the conference call. These meters will be in 40% of Nielsen homes in a year, with the rollout to continue until it covers all sample households with PVRs, VoD or other advanced TV technologies, McDonough said.