Ratings

The Financial Times reported Thursday that a group of US companies has formed a TV/video ratings consortium to challenge Nielsen. Participants in the consortium which, according to the article, will be operational next month, include media companies, NBC Universal, News Corp, Time Warner, CBS, Viacom, Discovery, and Disney; media agencies, GroupM and Starcom MediaVest; and advertisers, Procter & Gamble, AT&T (the largest and third-largest US advertiser respectively) and Unilever.

TiVo announced last week that its StopWatch ratings service (collects anonymous second-by-second audience research data from TiVo boxes) is now offering a new metric that it calls Pure Program Ratings. The metric, which TiVo says is derived using the number of TiVo subscribers viewing a program in live- or timeshifted mode, excluding the commercials, is designed to calculate the total potential audience for commercials during a given program.