Measuring Television (short form)

Today's very, very long NYT Magazine cover story on Neilsen and the new people meter, compressed and read with a Long Tail filter:

"...One day this January I sat in a Greenwich Village workroom with Bob Luff, the chief technology officer at Nielsen, as he pulled out gadget after gadget to show me what he's up against. Luff seemed to view the modern American home as a digital zoo where the lion is about to lie down with the lamb: radio is going on the Web, TV is going on cellphones, the Web is going on TV and everything, it seems, is moving to video-on-demand (V.O.D.) and (quite possibly) the iPod and the PlayStation Portable. ''Television and media,'' Luff said over the noise of five sets tuned to five different channels, ''will change more in the next 3 or 5 years than it's changed in the past 50.''...

...The average American household now sees 8 hours 1 minute of TV every day and has access to more than a hundred channels and several different sets -- often tuned to different channels in different rooms. Industry types call this phenomenon audience fragmentation. The days of a family gathering together on the couch are dying out for good. We're in pieces. Or as Steve Morris, the Arbitron C.E.O., put it more gently, ''People are dividing.'' Every age group, every cultural group and every demographic group, Morris added, is in the process of getting media packaged expressly for its members. In the next few years, this ''personalization'' will become only more and more pronounced....

...Whatever this transition means for TV viewers, it has different implications for advertisers. In recent months, in fact, a host of executives from big corporations, most notably Jim Stengel of Procter & Gamble, have begun publicly demanding that measurement companies like Nielsen and Arbitron provide better information about audiences. These advertisers don't mind talking to smaller groups of Americans. In fact, companies like fragments. The more specific an audience, the more confident they can be of reaching out to and persuading its constituents....

...Turow said he now sees little difference between television and the Internet. Nor do his students at Penn. They watch ''The O.C.'' wherever and whenever -- on their laptops, at home on TiVo and by swapping the show (perhaps illegally) through a Web-based file-sharing program called BitTorrent. The coming generation is accustomed to the idea of watching or listening to anything on any device that's nearby, Turow said. In the meantime, his generation (he's in his 50's) ''still thinks of media in these compartmentalized ways.''..."

Comments

[Flamsmark]

[last paragraph]... and the power to carry around all our content with us and, thereafter, to play it on any availible devices/systems is one that we (that is to say the 'ipod generation') all want.

and to get that content, we don't want to pay for a way to get content, we want to buy specific content and watch it, listen to it, show it to our friends, carry it, wear it; to use it on our terms, however we can. not how someone else thinks we want to. so if we could just legally buy the content that we want, and use it however we can.. we wouldn't need to steal the 'open' copies.

[Johnny Lumber]

I haven't seen anything written about the cultural fragmentation effects of this trend. I'm 52. In the household I grew up in my father decided on much of what got watched on our 1 TV. As a result, I have more than a passing familiarity with the culture of my parents generation. At the same time, they became aware of the Beatles , Rolling Stones, etc. The time is already here where one generation hasn't a clue as to what the others are interested in.