• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 27, 2009

Even as lawmakers voted to extend the U.S. transition to digital TV broadcasting for another four months, Nielsen executives maintain that the TV ratings firm is more than prepared even if that transition were to occur today.

"Given where we are on the digital transition today, the effect would be less than what we have over a normal Christmas season," Pat McDonough, senior vice president-insights, analysis and policy of Nielsen Co. told MediaDailyNews of Nielsen's current preparedness.

By the Christmas season, McDonough was referring to the amount of technological change that occurs in television households during a typical holiday season, when consumers purchase new televisions or other electronic equipment that change how they receive and watch TV, causing Nielsen engineers and field workers to troubleshoot how those households are metered for ratings.

McDonough said during the average Christmas holiday season, 10% of the Nielsen ratings sample is impacted by changes in TV viewing technology, including new TV sets, DVRs, DVDs, and other equipment. She said it normally takes Nielsen a couple of weeks to adjust to those changes, but estimated that if the digital TV transition were to happen now it would impact only about 6% of the households in Nielsen's sample.

"It would be less than what we normally deal with," she noted.

McDonough, and Nielsen Senior Product Manager for the digital TV transition Eric Rossi, spent some time with MDN to dispel an earlier report that Nielsen, and the rest of the industry, still are unprepared to deal with the transition. That report ("Nielsen: We're Still Unprepared For Digital Transition," Jan. 16), was based on a webinar Nielsen hosted Jan. 15 to review some of the technical issues involved in the digital TV transition. A report circulated by Nielsen in conjunction with that webinar did imply that there were still plenty of reasons to be concerned, but the Nielsen execs said the wording of that report was designed more rhetorical than a matter of fact.

The opening statement in the report read: ""Many broadcasters do not know how cable systems receive their signals."

"We had a meeting that we meant to be a check point with the industry as a whole," Nielsen's Rossi explained. "We know that there are steps that clients have to take to be prepared for the transition independent of us," he added, citing procedures such as encoding their programming so that it can be tracked by Nielsen.

"It was mainly geared toward engineers at a geek-to-geek meeting," he said. "It was catnip to them."

As such, the Nielsen executives asserted that the report was taken out of context, and that the reality is that Nielsen is more than confident that it is able to deal with any problems that would arise from the digital transition, which now looks like it will get a four-month reprieve following a vote by the U.S. Senate to extend the date to June 12 from Feb. 17.