• by Joe Mandese , May 8, 2007

Despite its nickname, New Orleans has proved to be anything but easy for Nielsen Media Research. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina forced Nielsen to suspend its ratings for a while, and ultimately to downgrade it from the nation's 43rd largest media market to its 54th. Now a new media anomaly has emerged in the Crescent City that has Nielsen engineers scratching their heads to understand why a disproportionate number of households in the market leave their TV sets turned on with nothing on the screen.

In fact, Nielsen has come up with a new term for describing the phenomenon: "blue screen tuning," a situation that occurs when TV is left on after a connected device, such as a video game or DVD player, is turned off.

"This leaves a blue or black 'on' screen," said Nielsen, in a client notice distributed on Monday. "Frequently the household does not even know that the television is still on, which can lead to several straight days of blue screen tuning."

When Nielsen detects such blue screen tuning, or for that matter, any form of tuning without viewing, it omits data from that household from its ratings and they are not factored into its estimates for households using television (HUT) in the market, or nationwide.

And while all TV markets exhibit some of this phenomenon, Nielsen said the levels in New Orleans are off the chart, raising implication for both the ratings in the market, as well as its contribution to Nielsen national TV ratings sample.

"In our national and local samples, blue screen tuning averages about 4% of all tuning. In New Orleans, however, the level of blue screen tuning has been about 12%," Nielsen said, adding that it believed one of the reasons for this phenomenon was that New Orleans has "an unusually high percentage of new TVs, including flat screen TVs, as well as devices attached to them."

Nielsen did not venture to say why New Orleans has a disproportionate share of flat screen TVs, but it could have something to do with a post-Katrina effect, as a significant number of households may have lost older electronic equipment due to the storm and the floods that followed.

Nielsen said that a methodological factor also appears to be contributing to New Orleans' blue screen tuning: some hardware and software problems with many of the ratings meters it has installed in the market.

"In a small number of cases, these errors prevented the meter from detecting audio from the television and, consequently, viewing was incorrectly credited to blue screen tuning when in fact the television was being watched," Nielsen explained, adding, "We estimate that about 5% of actual tuning in New Orleans was incorrectly credited as blue screen tuning."

Nielsen said it has already begun replacing the faulty meters in the market and will complete that process by May 21, and that it is beginning to implement similar steps in other markets to deal wit the phenomenon.

While the precise impact of blue screen tuning on Nielsen's local New Orleans and national TV ratings may not be known, Nielsen said a preliminary analysis indicates that less than 2% of all turning on a national basis has likely been impacted.

"This represents approximately a 0.8 rating point distributed among all sources of TV viewing," Nielsen said. "We are finalizing similar impact analyses for local markets but expect the results to be consistent with the national impact."