TiVo takes on Nielsen
DVR company unveils Stop Watch service
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The DVR company is set to announce its Stop Watch Local Markets service today at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.
Service will utilize the TiVo set-top boxes already in place in households throughout the country. According to TiVo's Todd Juenger, VP-general manager of audience research and measurement, the service has the ability to immediately enter any of the more than 200 local TV markets; which cities it rolls out first depends on demand and interest from advertisers and stations.
"We'll launch in no more than 10 markets and build it from there," Juenger said. "We're in discussions with all sorts of people."
TiVo has already been collecting national ratings, having introduced that service in February 2007. The company tracks ratings for 93 broadcast and cable networks.
TiVo said it isn't taking on Nielsen directly, but it's clear the DVR service senses weakness in some of the ways the ratings behemoth measures local markets.
"I would say that our product addresses a whole bunch of deficiencies in the current system," Juenger said.
Nielsen reps were unavailable for comment.
According to TiVo, its sample sizes will be much larger than Nielsen's, ranging from 25,000 homes in the top 20 markets to 5,000 in the smallest.
TiVo will also offer second-by-second numbers -- allowing for commercial measurement. The anonymous live and timeshifted measurement will also give subscribers a better sense of which commercials are fast-forwarded.
That may interest advertisers as Nielsen so far hasn't offered the same "C3" commercial ratings -- now the measurement of choice among media buyers -- on a local level.
Nielsen's local ratings are based on "average quarter-hour viewing," which means it can't break out commercial ratings. Nielsen did, however, recently start offering a "live plus three-day" number for local markets, which incorporates more DVR usage into its programming ratings. (Nielsen also offers live and live-plus-seven ratings for its local markets.)
The local TiVo ratings will solely chart households; TiVo has no plans to enter the demographic measurement business on a local basis for now but will likely add that option over time.
"That's why this will work well side-by-side with Nielsen," Juenger said. "We'll produce a much more stable, reliable household rating number. If you have a data source from Nielsen, there's no reason you can't overlay the two."
TiVo ratings subscribers also have to take into account that TiVo's user base indexes higher when it comes to income and education. Because its service collects data anonymously, there's no real way to alter that sample.
