They say that 650 million people watched the moon landing. How do they take in to account how many people were watching on the same television?
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Did they care about number of TV’s or number of people?
Back then, there were services that would do statistical studies. Nielson which might have heard of was one. We would occasionally get a log book and were asked to track what we watched. At the end of the period, the books were mailed back.
There were some that had electrical devices that you pushed a button on to indicate if you were watching abc, cbs, or nbc. There were only a few Channels back then.
I can’t confirm this, but it would be possible for companies to take polls, much like politicians do today and ask questions like “Did you watch? How many people?l and then with a small sample size of 1000 or so, you can extrapolate a total.
The other measuring services used similar statistical models to guess the number of viewers.
They don’t actually know how many people watched it. With broadcast TV you can’t know who is actually receiving the broadcast and whose TV is turned on at that channel.
What they did was simply survey. Ask a large group of people whether they watched the moon landing on TV and extrapolate from there to the entire population. That’s basically how TV ratings were measured.
You don’t really need to. You know how many televisions there are per household on average and you know how many people there are per household on average. That gives you the right numbers whether or not they watched on their own television or one family invited the other over to watch together. It’s still the same amount of people watching.
Nielson only applies in the US, and since there are about 330 million here now I doubt there was 650 million in 69. That’s a worldwide number and nothing more than a guess
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Way back the Nielson Company would call at random times of the day inquiring what station your tv was tuned to and if it was off or on.
I’m old.
There are actually only 3 proven people that watched it happen irl if I’m correct.
The rest of us got a video feed at a later time.
the real answer to this question is that they don’t even know how many tv sets were turned on
How do they know any television was tuned on?
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