@ VOD Summit: Battle Over Audience Measurement

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(by Dorian Benkoil) Comcast Spotlight president Charlie Thurston gave the keynote this morning, focusing on ads for VOD. While doing so he hinted at a budding storm over audience measurement. One could say he made a case that people no longer needed a Nielsen-type rating system, based on sampling of a registered panel, because his company’s digital set top boxes gave much better, deeper and more specific data. Here are the numbers he gave as an example to make his point:
Comcast’s hometown of Philadelphia has 2.4 million TV households.
Nielsen has 800 meters on TVs there. That’s one meter for every 3,000 homes.
2 million of Philly’s TV homes have cable, 800,000 of which are digital with set top boxes. There are 1.5 boxes per home. So that’s 1.2M set top boxes giving Comcast detailed usage information, compared with 800 for Nielsen. (He didn’t add, but I shall, that a lot of Nielsen’s measurements are still based on hand-kept diaries by viewers, which even Nielsen insiders acknowledge can be inaccurate.)

Comcast’s digital boxes are “showing very deep information per homesâ

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