Sweeps week

July sweeps week is upon us, but with a difference this year. Our home was picked as a Nielsen ratings home. It's a bit like television jury duty and a wonderful opportunity for me to keep obsessively detailed records about a trivial task! Seriously, I enjoy this sort of thing. I used to keep spreadsheets of all my income and spending down to the change that I found on the street. I eventually gave that up when the resulting graphs started making me depressed. Hooray for grad school?

The Nielsen people sent us $30, cash, to keep a log for each television and record who, when and what was watched. It even has a column to mark if the television is on with nobody watching it. They've been super serious about making sure that we fill out this little book. Before it arrived, I got a post card telling me that it was about to arrive. Then, after it arrived, I got a post card reminding me to start recording on Thursday. Then, on Thursday, I got a call from a representative reminding me to start recording. I'm starting to wonder if they'll send some hired goons over to check on my progress.

My only reservation about the system is that it doesn't really reflect the way that I watch a lot of programming. There is an akward way to note that a show was time-shifted with a VCR or DVR so long as recording and viewing take place within the week of interest. However, there is no way to indicate that I watched a show if I didn't get it from the local cable/broadcast provider. For example, if I was a huge fan of American Gladiators and wanted to also watch Gladiators UK and Gladiators Australia I would have to download it from the BitTorrent network. There is no way to indicate that I'm trying to watch shows that are not available from my local provider. The same thing applies if I were to use BitTorrent instead as a DVR. Also, the instructions say that I shouldn't write down any shows that I watch using a computer with a tuner card, but that I should write down when I use my television as a computer monitor. All this strikes me as asinine and leads me to believe that Nielsen is in some way responsible for the schizophrenic/ignorant/anachronistic approach that big media is taking when dealing with the internet. For example, Viacom is letting people watch the Daily Show and South Park for free on their website while simultaneously suing YouTube for one billion dollars for not screening out those same clips. Madness.

Nielsen also has a rating program for the record companies. Don't even get me started on those monsters.