PubTV worries as Nielsen
shifts rating method
It’s a bumpy ride, keeping up with Nielsen’s advances in ratings technology.
Public TV programmers in the largest TV markets say they learned to live with a sudden drop of at least 20 percent in audience estimates after the ratings company installed local people meters in their cities. Now, another new Nielsen system poses an even greater challenge to pubTV.
The company’s so-called “active/passive meters,” which track time-shifted viewings of television programs through digital video recorders and other devices, are now providing national ratings data. To make sure the delayed viewings are credited to the right stations, the meters collect metadata that stations encode in their broadcast signals.
The trouble is, only 23 of 348 public TV stations have purchased the Nielsen Audio Video Encoders (NAVE), and the majority of stations do not plan to buy the devices within the next year, according to survey conducted by PBS and APTS in November.
The new methods of tracking the myriad ways people now watch TV — and of capturing more precise data about who is watching and when — have added confusing twists to ratings analysis.
Various kinds of national ratings are now derived from household meters in the 56 overnight markets, viewing diaries kept during sweeps weeks, and statistically representative samplings of Local People Meter data. A/P meters are now used in 13 percent of households in Nielsen’s national sample, according to PBS Research.
Local ratings also come from a mix of methodologies. With Nielsen introducing local people meters next month in Atlanta, all of the top 10 markets will have viewing measured by LPMs, which gather real-time data on who is watching as well as what channel is on. Nielsen continues to use household meters, which track only TV tuning, for local ratings in the remaining overnight markets. In smaller cities, viewers fill out sweeps diaries.
The different methodologies can lead to contradictory conclusions about audience trends, as a discussion of PBS Kids Go! revealed at the Public Television Programmers Association meeting May 17 [2006] in Orlando, Fla. National data analyzed by PBS Research found the block of shows for school-aged kids had boosted viewing in the target group, age 6-8, by 50 percent in its first season, 2004-05.
PBS’s national numbers for the age group rose from 1.0 to 1.5, though the rating slipped to 1.3 this year. But local execs wanted to know how that could be when they were seeing a clear downward trend.
Comparable data is available for the 6-11 age group from both the national and local ratings:
With Nielsen adding A/P meters and adding an LPM sample to its national ratings, “it’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons,” said Craig Reed, director of audience analysis for TRAC, at the PTPA meeting. “You have to live with the book in your market,” he told programmers.
In addition to the different methodologies that Nielsen uses to collect national and local ratings data, the calculations used to derive the ratings are different, said Barbara Gordon, research director for New York’s WNET. “There’s always going to be a discrepancy,” she said.
Local and national ratings for children’s programs often seem to be at odds, she said, because Nielsen’s national ratings count all unduplicated viewings of a specific program across a day—morning and afternoon broadcasts of an episode of Arthur, for example. But stations in metered markets get separate local ratings for the two broadcasts, Gordon said.
Introduction of the A/P meters could prompt even more puzzlement about what the heck is going on with public TV’s ratings — but with dire consequences.
Nielsen predicted that public TV ratings could drop as much as 40 percent or more if stations don’t encode their local signals to be picked up by A/P meters, said WGBH chief technologist David Liroff, who began urging station leaders to encode their signals in 2004.
NAVE II encoders, which can handle one program stream, cost about $5,800; NAVE IIc encoders can handle four program streams and cost $6,850, according to PBS.
In 56 metered markets, stations must encode their signals for local overnight ratings and for the national metered sample, Liroff wrote in a briefing paper. Even stations in the remaining 154 diary markets must encode their signals because there are metered households in their cities that are included in the national metered sample.
“If a station doesn’t have an encoder installed, Nielsen won’t know where the program came from and will assign it to a bucket called ‘all other tuning,’” Liroff said.
Sharp declines in public TV’s national ratings will affect underwriting support for PBS’s National Program Service as well as case statements for federal and state funding of public TV.
“Every station in this system has to play in this game because we have a very significant financial stake in this,” Liroff said. “We will have weakened the case for federal support because we can’t show them that public TV continues to be highly demanded by the public all over the country.”
Execs from WGBH and PBS have been spreading the word about the needed encoders—and PBS has a request to help stations purchase the devices pending at CPB—but the progress that individual stations have made installing encoders haven’t kept pace with Nielsen’s A/P meter roll-out.
Nielsen accelerated installation of the meters late last year and by May had placed them in 13 percent of households in its national sample, according to John Fuller, senior director of PBS Research. By the end of the year, Nielsen aims to have the meters in 38 percent of its national household sample.
The 23 public TV stations that have encoding devices serve only 33 percent of TV households, Fuller told Current in an e-mail. “We need to accelerate the rate of stations encoding before our national daypart ratings deteriorate to the level of the Food Network’s (0.5).” Web page
posted Nov. 29, 2006
Copyright 2006 by Current Publishing Committee
