DragonZord
Banned
Thanks Breh.When you become a "Nielsen Household," there's a little box that is connected to your TV, which records information on your viewing habits, which shows you watch, when you watch those shows. From that pool of Nielsen viewers, they then come up with the ratings composites. It's very similar to sociological research in Academics in how they generalize and come up with ratings and ratings patterns (the problem with this being that it's difficult to determine a proper sample size. Only .02% of homes participate in Nielsen research, but that's about 25,000 televisions. Not to mention that services like Hulu aren't factored into ratings at all)
As for DVR data, that's considered, but only after the fact. It's not included in things like segment breakdowns or the fast number that we get on Wednesdays, but it's usually something like a 10% bump (maybe a little more than that, since more and more people are watching things on DVR).
It's not terrible, per se (their resistance to including DVR numbers in reported ratings at the behest of advertisers is complete bullshyt though), but with the way that media is consumed nowadays, measuring this one thing and taking it to be the be all and end all of television consumption is a bit of an anachronism. Whatever.
And what about folks who watch shows through HULU? I do that a lot too and wonder if they know or count that stuff.