Can You Believe TV Ratings Essay Research

Paper

“Can You Believe T.V. Ratings?”

I personally believe that TV rating systems are not as acurate as they could be in this day and age. Rating systems in general have been around for quite awhile now. The first rating systems began with radio programs that would call random people and would ask if they had been listening to a certain station at a certain time or what radio station they were listening to at the time of the call. After capturing ratings by phoning peopl eup there came personal interviews with the public. These personal interviews would ask the public what they were watching at a certain time ot a certain day. They were also asked what type of TV programs they liked and what programs they did not like. Since both these methods were not as accurte as the networks wanted the ratings system then was changed again. The company that toke over to accurtely take TV ratings was a company called Neilson. Neilson was now the company that TV netwoks would turn to, to see what shows were looking good and which ones were not worth the money. Neilson called their new product the “People Meter”, which was used to monitor what televison programs were being watched and by whom. The people meter was placed in random homes across america, either being familes or single men/women. If a family did not want the meter in their house hold then a family with the same setup would be found in the area and asked if they would like the meter in their home. I would never like this meter in my house due to the fact that its a pain in the behind to always have to configure the meter to who is watching tv everytime the tv is on. I would define the people that have the Neilson meter in their house holds as victims of a large company that will be monitoring you whenever you are in front of your televison. Also you cannot believe televison ratings becasue people that have Neilson meters don’t always tune in their singnals when watching televsion. Another reason that these ratings are not accurte are that only 4,000 homes in the US compared to that there is about 93 million televisons in the US have the Neilson people meter in their homes. Neilson believes that with the 4,000 meters out there, that it should be enough to accurtely describle what channels are being watched and when. The Neilson ratings also make it hardrt for smaller televison stations to find how many viewers they attract due to the small number of people who have the people meter. All in all you cannot believe TV ratings fully due to the facts of how the information is collected from the small number of people that have Neilson people meters.