One of the greatest things about new media is its merciless measurability. There’s little room for bull when confronted by the stats for your latest web project: it’s all there in black and white.
But what happens when you map this degree of tracking onto traditional broadcast output?
TiVo is probably the world’s most famous hard-disk TV recorder: the company pioneered the sector in America 10 years ago. For a while now they’ve been running a service called Stop||Watch – I’ve only just learned about it, but it fascinates me.
Stop||Watch plots US TV viewing patterns by microscopically monitoring hundreds of thousands of TiVo boxes – delivering information like:
after two weeks on the air an average of 46% of NBC’s The Jay Leno Show television audience opted to record the program and watch it later, as viewed by TiVo® service subscribers.
Nothing dramatically different here from what BARB in the UK produces (or, indeed, Nielsen for the US TV market).
In fact, to defend the old guard for a second, BARB has two fundamental advantages over TiVo’s entry-level panel of viewers. For one, BARB’s panel across the UK is statistically representative. And secondly, its figures take account of how many household members were present in the room when a given programme was showing (rather than TiVo’s cruder metric: “it was on the household’s telly”).
But BARB’s means of recording who was sat in front of the box is pretty rudimentary:
All panel household residents and their guests register their presence when in a room with a television set on. Each individual does this by pressing a button allocated to them on the peoplemeter handset.
And things get really interesting with TiVo’s figures when you start poring over data that conventional linear TV could, by definition, never provide.
For instance: which tiny elements of your output did viewers find so interesting they had to rewind and watch again?
And which moments – programming or ads – were so boring that timeshifters couldn’t get to the fast forward button quick enough?
TiVo’s ability to pull out these stats first came to public prominence after the infamous 2004 Super Bowl – during which Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” became “the most rewatched ever during a broadcast in three years of measuring audience reactions”.
Five years on, an increased sample of 350,000 boxes provides second-by-second data on TiVo viewing patterns. Below – a graph of this year’s Super Bowl. Click on the image to view it full size.
It’s like an electrocardiogram of interestingness.
And if you’re wondering what was so great about the Doritos ‘Crystal Ball’ ad (the most watched moment in the whole of the first half), I’m sure they’d appreciate your eyeballs below.
$3m splurged on airtime isn’t going to recoup itself.
BBC had similar technology back in 2001/2 – I saw a demo of it at the internal News Festival. I assume it’s via BARB, but they can track second-by-second changes in what channel people are watching. Absolutely fascinating – you realise how big the jump is when the credits roll and the marketing people insist on putting promos all over the credits, and increasingly in the preceeding programme.
Ah, interesting! I’ve seen charts for BBC programmes which split out their different segments, retrospectively – so you can see whether your third item made people switch over in their droves. What I like about the TiVo stuff, though, is the addition of rewind/fast-forward behaviour (although it’s not clear exactly how it’s integrated into the chart above). An audience rewinding a few seconds to view again, en masse, is like a collective retweet; an audience fast forwarding in unison is the reverse. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks Robin – interesting post.