TV Ratings

[stoory]

How do they know who watched what programme to get the ratings? And if you tape record a programme is this counted? Thanks!

[BriWrite]

BARB conduct the TV ratings survey. A few thousand households in the country have a little black box attached to each TV in their homes. Every member of the household has a code, and whenever they are in the room watching the tv, they type in their code and the box registers it. The info is sent back to BARB and they then work out how many poeple were likely to be watching. The boxes are spread between all age groups and social groups. So while the majority of those few thousand with the little black boxes might be watching BBC, its possible that the other 59 and a bit million of the population could be watching ITV. In other words the ratings are a load of tosh, a flawed tool no doubt seen as the Holy Grail by Ad men.

[aurelia]

What I have heard and seen written down is that they trace a general amount from the natonal grid - electricity. apparently hen a programme ends there is a power surge on the national grid as loads of people put their kettles on. It sounds a bit weird. I would think they would have to have some other way as well because not everyone drinks tea or coffee - but all results are only averages anyway

[Loosehead]

Biwrite is correct in how it workd but not in the conclusion. Statistically you do not need a very large sample of the total to predict the overall tendency to a reasonable level of accuracy.

[gammaray]

The bigger the sample the more accurate the statistic will be. You can of course generate a statistic from a sample of 2, but obviously there are only three possible outcomes - 0 or 50% or 100% with this. The more people in the sample the better and more accurate the result.

[mycatis]

That gets said a lot aurelia, but I'm 99% sure that it's just not true. TV ratings are nothing to do with power surges or the national grid

[gammaray]

It is as BriWrite describes. Sadly there are no power surges, clandestine monitoring or hint of Big Brother (that's the George Orwell BB not the channel 4 one!) . it's a cross section of society who register their watching habits through a set top box. I believe you can apply to be on the panel.