From a research perspective, digital set top box (STB) data is the most exciting thing to happen to the television research business since people meters rolled out in the late eighties. It has the potential to have a giant impact on the industry" second by second data, new ad retention metrics, precise commercial and brand ratings, enormous sample sizes as well as the ability to directly link tuning data with other information at a household or device level.

There are many competing missions within the advertising and content industries. While in many cases we all distribute on the same universally accepted TV platform, each of us are using the respondent viewer data in our own customized way. Even though each group's goals may be different, these silos knit together a rich tapestry of compelling content and marketing messages that is then delivered to consumers who then further customize the video stream with their DVR. So powerful is this omnipresent platform that a cottage industry of mobile and Internet video has sprung up to catch the leakage.

On Sept. 16th in New York City at The Helen Mills Theater, MPG & MediaContacts, Havas siblings, will stage its quarterly forum, The Collaborative Alliance, where content creators, technologists, distributors and researchers meet to vet their interactive televisual propositions (television, broadband, wireless and out of home).

I'm sorry to hear about Steve Sternberg being departed from the Interpublic Group of Co's -- his home for the last quarter century plus. He was EVP of Audience Analysis and an oft-quoted prognosticator of TV viewing for the media community.

Brad Adgate, media research veteran of 31 years, discusses such topics as crowdsourcing -- and why this year's upfront is going to be like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There has been a plethora of press these last couple of weeks heralding the arrival of each new TV network that proudly joined Comcast/Time Warner's TV Everywhere initiative -- much like the names of prized athletes trumpeted over crackling loud speakers as they enter their hometown field to the thunderous applause of the franchisees, stadium owners and concessionaires.

The Confederation of American Native Tribes had lost their rain. Ponies moved uneasily. Dogs rarely barked. Arrows fell shy of their mark. Crops shrunk. Abodes abandoned. The Confederation elders sought a new shaman, one who possessed all of the necessary qualifications and attributes to commune with the weather.

In early July 2009, Verizon contracted with Comcast, the largest cabler in the U.S., to utilize their local sales force to represent Verizon's FiOS video commercial inventory in markets where the two companies offer competing consumer television and broadband platforms -- approximately 10 major markets.

Last month my satcaster stuffed my monthly biller with a 6-page, weathered-white and dull-black, densely worded, succinctly titled brochure entitled PRIVACY POLICY. This informative piece of literature (see below), was divided into the following non-paginated, accordioned sections and opened with "dedicated to protecting consumer privacy":

A few years ago on a mild sunny, Saturday afternoon my wife got into a traffic accident with another vehicle. It wasn't her fault. Really. A woman and her young son were in the process of making an indiscreet left turn on a country road when they spied my wife and young son in her leased orange Mini Cooper with the racing strips and convertible top and froze mid-turn. As my wife later explained, she tried to avoid the startled woman -- but given the woman's waffling and the heading-on traffic in the opposite lane, there was little wiggle room. …