I want to know how the process works, how does the software know who’s watching since it’s just a digital signal and not connected to the internet. Also what’s the minimum duration that’s considered as a show is watched
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Currently it’s mostly digital. The host of the show can see how many people are accessing the content. Most of these report to Nielsen Ratings.
The primary ratings body for commercial television in the USA is Nielsen. Nielsen determines ratings through a couple of methods. The primary method is by paying individuals/families to be a “Nielsen Household”. For a certain amount of money (used to be $100 a month) a household agrees to let a Nielsen technician install a monitoring box on their television setup to monitor usage. This box reports ratings each night and in realtime either using an internet or cellular connection. By choosing households with a wide demographic spread Nielsen uses statistical methods to determine ratings in key age/gender groups.
In addition to the ratings boxes television broadcasters – in conjunction with Nielsen – install equipment which embeds a tracking code into the audio of every program broadcast. This “watermark” is hidden in the audio using an acoustic masking technique which takes advantage of the ear’s inability to hear high and low frequency sounds simultaneously. Data bursts during certain portions of the audio are inserted, and this can be picked up by Nielsen equipment in Nielsen households and “portable people meters” people agree to wear. The portable meters allow capture of ratings data when a Nielsen person goes to a bar or someone else’s house.
Nielsen has also started inserting watermarks on television broadcast streams on the Internet and aggregating this data into the ratings sample.
The “minimum duration” of a view is usually 60 seconds. This is determined by limitations in the technology used to insert the Nielsen watermarks into the audio signal.
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