[Excerpted with permission from Multichannel News Digest.] From: owner-cablereg-l@netcom.com Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 09:25:14 -0700 Subject: Multichannel News Digest 3/20 Reply-To: higgins@netcom.com Multichannel News Digest Highlights from Multichannel News 5/20/1996. Vol.3, No.21 Copyright 1996 Multichannel News. Reproduction/distribution is permitted so long as this document is left fully intact. NO CHANGES are to be made to this document without the written consent of Multichannel News. Refer questions to John Higgins (higgins@dorsai.dorsai.org or 212-887-8390) For Multichannel News subscription information: 800-247-8080. A bargain at $84/year. [...] Ops Eye Set-Tops to Track Viewing By LINDA MOSS When cable ad managers complain about Nielsen Media Research, some wistfully predict that local viewership data will eventually be collected directly through set-top converters. Garden State Cable TV has been doing just that for some time now. "We wanted to get accurate ratings just for our universe," said Doug Barrington, Garden State's director of advertising. "We felt in a lot of ways [that] we were looking into the future." Garden State, a system covering a Philadelphia suburb in the state of New Jersey, has been collecting TV tune-in data since 1994 from about 110,000 homes that have Sprucer converter boxes. Those two-way communications boxes, manufactured primarily with pay-per-view in mind by a Japanese vendor that's not in the business anymore, had been installed in more than one-half of Garden State's 200,000-subscriber base. Garden State isn't the only cable system that has tried using converter boxes to collect TV-viewing data for its own coverage universe. The former Paragon cable systems in San Antonio and in Portland, Ore., now both owned by Time Warner Cable, have used Zenith converters in the past to collect viewership data. In addition, Cablevision Systems Corp. experimented with gathering viewership data using General Instrument Corp. converter boxes in its systems in the Bronx and Brooklyn, N.Y., said Dan Moloney, GI's general manager of analog systems. Existing analog set-tops from both GI and Scientific-Atlanta Inc. already have some capacity to monitor and take "snapshots" of what channel a TV set is tuned to a feature typically used in relation to PPV. "It's a limited function," said Chuck Kaplan, S-A's vice president of marketing for subscriber systems. But MSOs have expressed an interest in new, advanced set-tops having the capability to do continuous monitoring of TV tune-in, and to store and forward the data, both Moloney and Kaplan said. So both GI and S-A plan to introduce these types of features in the coming generations of advanced "smart" boxes. "As we move into the future, we'll see more of that," Moloney said. But there are several potential catches when a cable system decides to pull viewership information from converter boxes. For example, the set-tops don't provide any demographic data on audiences. "They don't know who's watching," Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus said. And there are even broader issues. "The question down the road is, do cable operators want to be in the ratings business?" Sims said. "You have got to process that [viewership] data. And another issue is, do media buyers want a third-party processor to handle that data?" [...] HOW TO GET THE MULTICHANNEL NEWS DIGEST: E-MAIL - To: listserv@netcom.com Subject: Ignored Body: subscribe cablereg-l WWW - http://www.multichannel.com -30-