Page 159 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 147
debated legal battle between Sony and Universal, one of the major Hollywood television
production studios, over the issue of copyright law. The final outcome of the battle was in
favour of Sony and, as a consequence, of viewers. In the words of James Lardner (1987:93),
‘Sony had tapped into a desire which had been gathering force, in a stifled and largely
unconscious way, all through the thirty-year history of television’.
10 A 1984 Nielsen survey estimated that about 75 per cent of home taping is for time-shifting
purposes (mentioned in Potter et al. 1988).

9
The ‘people meter’ solution
1 See, for a description of the various people meter methodologies, Beville (1986b).
2 Sex and age have traditionally been the most important demographic parameters used in
network/advertiser negotiations. The computerized data delivery procedure of the people
meter makes far more detailed demographic segmentation possible. In 1987, Nielsen’s
people meter offered ratings information for 39 demographic classifications, AGB 38. AGB
was the first to include income categories in its reports (particularly incomes over $30,000
and $40,000). Furthermore, the people meter services deliver demographic information to
the cable networks. This focus on measuring smaller segments of the television audience
made an increase of the sample size necessary in order to reduce the effects of sampling
error, especially for smaller audience segments (such as audiences for the speciality cable
channels). Thus, Nielsen’s NTI system made use of a sample of 1700 households, its people
meter sample is 4000. See Broadcasting (7 September 1987:37). See also Barnes and
Thomson (1988) and Miller (1988).
3 AGB contended that ‘compliance rates’ in Britain, Germany and Italy, where the firm has
experience with its people meter, runs at over 90 per cent. Incidentally, the ‘compliance rate’
for the traditional diary only runs at about 55 per cent, according to an Arbitron official cited
by Gardner (1984). Beville (1985) estimated the response rate of diaries at 40 to 50 per cent.
4 The networks have been the most vocal in attacking the people meter’s alleged lack of
accuracy (cf. Poltrack 1988; Rubens 1989), while other branches of the industry—such as
the cable networks—have been less critical because they expected to benefit from the new
measurement system. For one thing, the people meter offered, for the first time, overnight
demographic information about cable audiences, which is seen as a ‘tremendous advantage’
by the cable companies. (Broadcasting 5 September 1988).
5 In fact, the infra-red sensing device is used as a check in case viewers do not push buttons.
Furthermore, Percy’s people meter is distinctive in that it measures audiences for
commercials rather than audiences for programmes. Percy planned to introduce its service
nationally, but went out of business because of cash flow problems in the summer of 1988
(Broadcasting, 15 August 1988).
6 In Europe, too, the passive people meter idea has caught on in the commercial research
industry. The French research agency Motivaction has developed Motivac, an electronic
detection system that supposedly can identify individuals by their appearance, their known
viewing habits and where they usually sit. Jean-Louis Croquet, head of the agency, intends
to enter both the French and the British audience measurement market with the system,
which was received with widespread scepticism as to both its technical and financial
feasibility. See Kleinman (1989).