In last week's column I wrote about the television industry's continued search for supplements to -- and ultimately, replacements for -- the dead weight (i.e., the "Bernie" of "Weekend at Bernie's") of traditional media measurement: age-sex demos.This week I want to show you why more and more buyers and sellers of media are moving away from using current currency by itself and toward more actionable set-top-box data paired with other types of data: behavior-based, and -- for our purposes here -- purchase-based.

Once called Personal Video Recorders, Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) enable viewers to pre-record programs and view them at their convenience in trick play modes. DVRs are also touted as one of the major forms of commercial avoidance, which has in turn led to numerous research studies that try to understand the impact of DVR usage.

Lisa Joy Rosner, CMO of NetBase, is not only on the cutting edge of social media research and marketing, she is also an expert in e-commerce and CPG trends. In this interview, Lisa Joy talks about NetBase and its proprietary insight and analysis of social media for marketers, the issue of privacy in the digital arena and the mind of the new consumer. She also posits some predictions about the media landscape and what we can expect from social media in the years to come.

If you'll indulge me this week, I'd like to cover a couple of topics of interest in MediaTech. On Conferences: I attended two last week. There continues to be a steady drumbeat of discussion on the subjects of targeting and measurement, very often by the same strong voices.

"Age/sex demos are dead." So went the refrain last week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas and, later, at an event my company co-hosted in New York. But despite all the chatter, and despite the industry's consistently and increasingly warm reception of the new generation of media-measurement solutions, many marketers seem inexplicably (to me at least) reluctant to let go of traditional television ratings.

We have Set-Top Boxes, whether Analog or Digital and hardware that helps to migrate from analog to digital. But there are ways to transmit signals that either bypass the box entirely or that are in place of a box, whether it is considered Over The Air (OTA) or Over The Top (OTT). In either case, the method of capturing usage data from the box faces challenges.

Howard Horowitz is best known for his eponymous company Horowitz Associates, Inc. a full-service market research company specializing in research for distributors, networks and technology companies on television, digital and multiplatform services and content. Howard discusses his background in political, media and market research, trends over past decade in the multicultural landscape culminating in the release of Census 2010, and the anticipated impact the coming of age of a new generation of young people will have on television usage.

In Dudley Moore's portrayal of "Arthur" (I haven't seen the Russell Brand movie), there's a classic scene in which he observes that waiters are wonderful people because "you ask them for things and they bring them to you." Arthur was about innocent discovery, most often of the obvious. We are all Arthur today, it seems, rediscovering everything, because some of the things around us are new. Last week a breathless report announced, "Yahoo study connects relevance to advertising." Really?

The Big Apple can feel like a small town sometimes, so I wasn't too surprised to find myself at Chelsea Piers two separate times last week, for two very different events: a three-on-three basketball tournament, which my team almost won in the finals on the Garden floor after the Knick-Cavs game, and the GigaOm Structure Big Data Conference, where I spoke on a panel about how data-driven solutions are driving revenues for advertisers and networks alike.

e are in an industry of continual transition. Digital compression spawned the recent migration from analog to digital. As a result, there is a range of converter and adaptor hardware that helps analog homes convert to digital or enables analog homes to convert digital signals to be viewed on an analog set. Here are terms and definitions related to converters and adaptors: