In the world of audience research, the Set Top Box (STB) is being hailed as almost "the next best thing since sliced bread." It does everything! Want second-by-second data? You've
got it! Want to see what happens during commercial breaks? Piece of cake! How about all of that fast-forwarding, muting, pausing and rewinding activity? No problem! STBs
will slice and dice an audience to the point where your head is spinning faster than the blades on a Cuisinart! And the best part? You can have all of this for a FRACTION of what you pay
Nielsen!
Wake up, people! Put down the Kool-Aid, because it's time for a reality check among national and local researchers, planners, strategists, analysts, CROs, CIOs, UFOs,
EIEIEIOs -- and any of the myriad of creative titles we've dreamed up for ourselves because being a "researcher" is SO last century.
Now, let the myth-busting begin!
Myth: STB measurement uses a "census" rather than "panel" approach.
advertisement
advertisement
Busted: STBmeasurement excludes HHs that receive signals over-the-air and cable HHs that
don't have "return path" capability. Also, in some cable or satellite HHs, not every set is connected to the service. To not include these HHs is to ignore the tuning differences we
know exist among these and wired or fully wired HHs. DVR tuning to stand-alone devices is excluded because it is not captured by the STB.
Myth: STB measurement provides second-by-second tuning data.
Busted: Not all STBs capture tuning data every second. Some capture every two seconds, while
others capture every time there is a tuning event change. Therefore, although some STB data may be reported in seconds, it is not necessarily based on the collection of every second of
tuning activity between two points in time.
Myth: The larger samples used in
STB measurement provide a better representation of a market's tuning activity than do Nielsen's smaller LPM or Set Meter samples.
Busted: Not necessarily. In a DMA where a telco's STB HHs represent only 8% of the market's TV HHs, you will not
get a complete picture of tuning activity, especially if those STB HHs are clustered geographically or if the telco's subscribers have specific age, income, or other characteristic skews that don't
mirror those of the DMA.
Myth: STB measurement provides accurate data on
commercial tuning and avoidance.
Busted: Again, not necessarily. While some STB data
providers use information from ad monitoring services, other STB data providers may be "deducing" the times during which commercials air by looking at when declines in tuning activity occur.
Based on the assumption that if ratings are low, it must be a commercial, this method fails to account for unanticipated schedule changes, long-running movie credits, news cut-ins, silent
periods within programs during which Nielsen code can't be detected, etc.
STBs might be the future of video audience measurement, but as we learned from the recently
released CRE STB study, there are many questions for which we don't have answers. For instance:
Is the STB able to differentiate between TV Set On and Off? Will modeling
Set On/Off provide the precision and accuracy we seek for commercial and program ratings?
What constitutes tuning? Is it one second? One minute? Five minutes?
More broadly, is the Web model -- having multiple metrics providers using substantially different methodologies that provide significantly different data -- the right model for
TV?
The point: much work remains to be done before STB data are used to plan, buy, sell or post. Our mantra should be "Do It Right" rather than "Just Do It."