How were they reported during the 60s to 90s, and how honest were they? My uneducated opinion is that they were transitioned to all digital tracking now, but with multiple streaming services and lack of transparency, are they even relevant in the 21st century?
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They take a profile of every member of your house. They connect monitoring devices to all of your televisions. Whenever someone watches a show, they put their ID into the device so it registers them as watching the channel the TV is turned to.
For computers, they now have apps that can monitor whether you’re going to a streaming site or not.
But you’re right that they can’t catch everything. But it is still works well for live watching cable/satellite programming.
In the good ol’ days they used what they called “diaries”. Basically a notebook and it was the responsibility of each member of the monitored house to write down when they started watching, which channel, and when they stopped. Obviously that was prone to error and wasn’t super accurate. However, there were no where near the number of channels there are now – so it was a reasonable assessment.
There are still a few diary markets out there, but most markets are measured with set top boxes these days. These are boxes with buttons programmed to each member of the house hold. When you go to watch TV you’re supposed to press the button, then again after you are done. The set top monitors which channels you watch. This still obviously has a human element so there are errors, but less than before.
They also use personal devices. Little bits of hardware you wear that listen for codes embedded in the audio of different channels. These are a lot more accurate, obviously, but have their own issues. Like if you go to a sports bar with a show playing that you’re not really watching, the device may register it.
As far as online streaming – it’s hit or miss. I’ve been out of the game a few years but back when I worked in that field it was basically garbage. They had no real clue what you were watching. I imagine that’s still pretty accurate, regardless of what they may say.
As a last point – all of this measuring is always conducted on a very small sample size. Think a hundred households in a market of 10k+. Maybe a thousand households in major cities. They run “maths” on the data to supposedly extrapolate that to the general population, but personally I always thought it was pretty flawed.
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