Uncounted Viewers Are Hiding in Public--for Now

Sitting in a Westwood bar a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but notice an evenly divided group of eight males and females who were presumably college students. What caught my eye was that they were paying no attention to one another, instead silently watching the WB’s “Smallville” as they munched on salads and curly fries.

Beyond being reminded that youth is wasted on the young, I began to consider some of my own recent out-of-home TV viewing experiences, among them catching a Lakers playoff game in a Santa Monica bar (hey, at least I vary locations) amid a throng of loud, out-of-shape men, many wearing imitation Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant jerseys.

Aside from perhaps a tacit cry for help, why bring this up? Because none of those viewers was counted by Nielsen Media Research, the ratings service whose estimates govern the sale of billions of dollars in advertising time.

The late spring and summer have long been a time for vacations, barbecues, baseball and NBA playoff games, but those activities also coincide with TV viewing that isn’t captured by traditional ratings methodology.

Broadcasters have griped for years about this blind spot in Nielsen’s system, and the service does commission occasional out-of-home studies to help mollify its biggest clients. Advertisers, not surprisingly, have been less enthusiastic about examining such oversights, in essence telling the networks, “Sure, we know people are watching outside the home, but just throw them in as an extra.”

Still, one suspects that the complaints will take on a greater sense of urgency as network ratings steadily dwindle--the latest evidence coming when the official television season ended last week, with Nielsen data showing declines for every major network except NBC, which received an extraordinary boost from the Winter Olympics.

Even NBC pleads its case on this score almost daily, with every press release noting that Nielsen figures are based on “measurable in-home viewing.” In other words, the ratings overlook women watching “Days of Our Lives” at work on their lunch breaks, fans of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Daily Show” in college dorms, and groups who gather in a friend’s living room to obsess over “Survivor.”

Moreover, this issue hardly just concerns the major networks. Think of all the time people spend watching CNN and Fox News Channel in hotel rooms, CNBC in offices and fitness centers (a treadmill is the perfect place to be while seeing one’s stock plummet) and ESPN in pubs and clubs.

Small wonder that the TV industry, or at least its slide-rule contingent, is quietly salivating about a test being conducted by Arbitron, the radio ratings service, of a “portable people meter”--a pager-sized device that subjects carry with them wherever they might go to record their viewing and listening habits.

Roughly 1,500 people in Philadelphia are walking around with one of these gizmos, which detect an inaudible code that is embedded in radio and TV station signals. Each day, test subjects simply plug the monitors into “base stations” that recharge them while simultaneously downloading the data and transmitting it in for tabulation.

Arbitron plans to release more detailed results next month, but preliminary findings from the test, which is being conducted with Nielsen’s cooperation, have charted substantial increases in TV viewing and slightly lesser gains for radio use. Keep in mind that Nielsen estimates the average household, taking all the residents into account, has a TV on more than seven hours a day, so the portable meters depressingly suggest that America might be even more densely populated with couch-hugging slugs than was previously imagined.

Perhaps most significant, the portable meter is a passive means of gauging media consumption, whereas radio and local television each rely to varying degrees on diaries, asking people to remember and honestly report their media tastes. And really, do you want anyone to know how much time you devote to “Jerry Springer” or radio’s “smack”-talking Jim Rome instead of “Masterpiece Theatre” or classic novels on tape?

Where this technology leads is anybody’s guess, but it could benefit the networks, which seems only fair given the impact that past advancements have had on them. After all, programmers have endured a series of innovations--the remote control, VCR, home entertainment system, personal computer and now personal video recorder such as TiVo--that contribute to people camping out in front of their TV without necessarily watching their programs, or in the last case facilitate skipping the commercials that help pay for them.

As it stands, the portable people meter might not go far enough to suit broadcasters, since participants need to have the device on their person for it to work. The next logical step might require tagging people’s ears with mini-receivers, the same way they tracked the movement of wildebeest on “Wild Kingdom.” After all, there is seemingly no shortage of dolts willing to do ridiculous things to be on television; you have to assume some would be equally rabid (take note, disgruntled “Once and Again” fans) to register their opinions about it.

All this is worth remembering as we dive into the summer, when people scatter to vacation homes, take trips or sit in bars cheering on Shaq and Kobe as they endeavor to give Angelenos reason to keep thousands of annoying car window banners flying.

It’s a common refrain, of course, that there’s nothing good to watch on television, especially over the next few months, when hit series slip into rerun mode. Depending on how the research goes, however, we might discover that the public--including college kids who really should find something better to do--are watching a whole lot more of nothing than we thought.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at [email protected].