• by Joe Mandese , August 8, 2006

Nielsen Media Research Monday announced another deal with a major cable system operator to participate in a fledgling video-on-demand reporting service, but simultaneously informed clients that a new system for measuring video-on-demand usage in Nielsen's regular TV ratings sample would be delayed for several weeks.

Nielsen had originally planned to introduce new software last week that would enable its TV ratings meters to measure programming viewed via video-on-demand, but now says that software will be released on August 20.

The software also will enable Nielsen to measure households with other forms of time-shifted viewing, including DVD recorders and networked digital video recorders, and is part of Nielsen's aggressive plan to measure time-shifted viewing across all the major platforms.

But even as it is poised to begin measuring video-on-demand, Nielsen recently disclosed date indicating that its sample does not adequately represent DVR households. According to a research paper released to clients on July 18, only about 4.8 percent of Nielsen's TV ratings sample had DVRs as of April 30, the last period Nielsen has released such data for.

"For the next several months, the DVR homes in the panel will not necessarily be representative of all DVR homes as we are in the process of installing and catching up with the DVR universe," reads the report, which did not indicate when Nielsen's sample would accurately represent the DVR universe.

Nielsen executives have previously said they expect Nielsen's sample to catch up with the DVR universe this summer, and certainly by the start of the 2006-07 TV season. Estimates for U.S. DVR penetration run from about 6 percent to as much as 12 percent currently.

In March, Nielsen estimated that DVRs were in about 10 percent of U.S. TV households and projected they would reach 18 percent by the end of the year. In March, Interpublic's Magna Global unit estimated that DVRs were in about 11.7 percent of U.S. TV households.

Meanwhile, Nielsen is pushing ahead with its fledgling video-on-demand measurement service, dubbed NORA for Nielsen On Demand Reporting & Analytics.

Nielsen announced a deal with Insight Communications, the ninth largest cable TV operator in the U.S. It is the second major deal to access video-on-demand data from a cable operator since Nielsen unveiled plans for the service. In February, Nielsen said it struck a similar deal with Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable operator.

Nielsen has not disclosed how many households it would be receiving data for in those deals, or how the data would be reported. But the service seems intended more for video-on-demand programmers than for other stakeholders, such as advertisers and agencies that might also be impacted by increasing usage of video-on-demand services.

"Our objective is to work with all the leading VOD service providers to better understand and report overall consumer viewing preferences in conjunction with other forms of video delivery, including television viewing," Holly Leff-Pressman, senior vice president and general manager of Nielsen's On-Demand Service said in a statement announcing the Insight deal.

Competing researchers including U.K.-based TNS and fledgling erinMedia have begun working directly with cable operators to access clickstream data from their digital set-tops in an effort to understand how people view television.