t.v. ratings system

But on top of that it came with a remote that the viewers used to log in and out when watching and all of this information was stored in the box where a computer at the AGB building would call and have that information transferred via telephone. On these rating reports it has several different types of information, some of this information includes the household using television or HUT, a share, and the rating. The good data is then entered and processed into the main computers and is then calculated, this usually takes several weeks before the reports are ready to be sent out. This type of survey continued on for a while until advertising companies began to demand the estimated size of their listening audience in order to decide what stations that they would air their product advertising on. Even though this is more accurate than asking a person what they had listened to the night before, the human memory is not always correct or reliable. These methods of the CAB operated until 1946 when another company saw the opportunity at hand and seized the chance to begin a more accurate and more productive way to measure the audience. From this came the first recorded method of audience recording called the telephone recall method. This method was more accurate in that the questioned would not have to rely on their not so dependable memory. In 1949 Nielson received a competitor in the TV rating business and that was the American Research Bureau, later known as Arbitron. An English company called AGB Television Research developed this box and it was set on top of the TV set and automatically recorded which station was being watched and for how long. When the rating company’s put all of this information together they come up with two numbers that let the network company’s know just how well they are doing in comparison to others. This new company was different from other rating companies in that the Nielson industry did not rely on only house-to-house telephone calls, but instead came up with a mechanical device called the audimeter. heard this request and also to state whether their stations signal was clear or not. Nielson was doing fairly well in the business, but it lacked one major source of information that many broadcasters and advertisers were looking for and that was demographics. The Arbitron solved this problem of lack of demographic information by coming up with the diary.