• by Masha Geller , June 2, 2003

The one trump in the hand of interactive media has always been the ability to tell advertisers, "unlike TV, we can give you exact counts of everything your ad goes through online - from how many people see it, to how many act on it." This argument has never really been enough to convince anyone to shift significant TV dollars to the Internet, but now the time has come to rethink it completely.

The Web is no longer the most measurable medium of all time. Not the way TiVo sees it, anyway. TiVo today unveiled a TV audience measuring system that allows it to report the second-by-second viewing habits of its subscribers to advertisers and network programmers.

The system represents a potential new revenue stream for the maker of digital video recorders (DVR), which is trying to transform itself into a media services company and seeking other ways of making money beyond the monthly subscriber fees it collects.

The new service, which will produce a quarterly viewing report, would track a sample of TiVo's more than 700,000 users, whose DVRs allow them to record more than 40 hours of shows, pause live TV, instantly replay favorite scenes or fast-forward through commercials.

The report would, for example, tell advertisers which commercials audiences watched in their entirety during an episode of the comedy "Friends." It can also inform "Friends" creators that viewers changed the channel when a particular character entered the scene.

According to the company announcement, TiVo does not intend to compete with rival Nielsen Media Research, the ubiquitous voice in the television industry for tracking audience viewership. Instead, TiVo stresses that its service could perhaps be a companion to Nielsen data that advertisers and networks use to make decisions about programming.

The good news is we still have a little bit of time to come up with a better sales pitch.