AFAIK the plan in the UK is simply to add the PCs in a statistically-representative selection of households who are regular VOD users to the contingent whose home sets are already wired up the the monitoring system. Any other approach would be hard to fit into the methods used to project the data from the measurements of traditional viewing, so I imagine it would be the same in other countries.

In fact though, the current nature of VOD technology would mean that much more accurate “ratings” of this viewing sector would possible. Each viewer has an individual “session” on the broadcaster’s streaming server. Those sessions could be counted at source (as they clearly are being according to that article) and where the user has to login to connect, user data could be linked to them, which advertisers would love.

On the question of ratings influencing the length and plotting of dramas after they’ve actually started to air, if I’ve understood other Korean media sources correctly (which I may well not have done), then Insoon is Pretty was actually shot in its entirety by an independent production company, then auctioned in the can to the broadcasters, ending up with KBS. Which would mean that in the case of that drama, there could be no significant last minute changes as a consequence of ratings, though of course there’s always scope for changes in the editing suite.

they’ll be factoring in viewership from online VOD to the ratings?

A very recent article analyzing the drama’s ratings with VOD:
http://kr.news.yahoo.com/service/news/shellview.htm?linkid=4&articleid=20071116151626257b6&newssetid=1352

#22 mawee “what the heck does it have to do with the ratings?”

Well actually in Korea there’s an interaction between the ratings and the plot because of the type of shooting schedule they use, with only a couple more episodes ‘in the can’ when a given one goes out (though they seem to be shifting away from that pattern a little now and storyboarding and shooting further ahead).

Ratings performance can cause a drama to be shortened or lengthened on the fly, influencing the extensions of side plots or the leaving of loose ends. And there have been cases where the ratio of walking-and-weeping to punching-and-yelling has been shifted one way or the other to try to nudge ratings up. So even if ratings don’t influence what you watch or how much you enjoy it, they can actually change what you get to see in the first place.

In other countries too, the ratings have a big influence on whether series are extended or given sequels, but its much rarer for them to cause scripts to be rewritten or drastically edited while a drama is actually airing.

#20: Gramps

Valid point. Thanks for the heads up (my god, someone actually read my comments. And replied). Ratings are an archaic way of measuring public response. Sure, they’re just extrapolated analysis from a small number of TV viewership. I agree that TV-land execs need a more interactive and accurate method of sensing viewers’ response. In this internet-influenced society, you figure they should take in consideration foreign viewership from live streaming and DL’able sources (even if they are illegal. Ha), right?

My comment about the masses was not meant to direct at the ratings, but more in the line of things favored by the general public (aka: mainstream materials in general). By the way, i really want to know who the Nielsen viewers are in the US. I guess the issue in question here is the rating system itself. But then cool people shouldn’t even care about the system. Screw it, we’re doing our own things anyway…:)

Hey, this preview thingy just pops up… it’s kinda cool but unsettling to see me typing in two places. It’s so surreal. I’m glad that the edit function is back though. How i wish i can have the same edit function for my life.

#19 geekgal “Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with being a part of the masses”

Maybe not. But in any case, it’s a big leap of faith to believe that the ratings reflect “the masses” anyway. The ratings companies claim they do, and the TV companies don’t argue because they need advertisers to believe the ratings so they’ll buy slots at premium prices. But ratings only measure actual audiences via a statistical model. They don’t actually count how many people tune in. What they do measure is what a very small (though supposedly representative) sample of households watch. The rest is just sampling theory and statistical projection.

I don’t know for sure the current number of households monitored by the Korean ratings industry, because my Korean is so lousy that it takes me about 6 hours and five large coffees to read a few pages of journal article, but a piece I did struggle through about how this was done in 2002 revealed that at that time there were 1,000 households monitored in Seoul and 1,000 in the rest of the country, 750 of those being in or around Pusan. Hardly the masses. Maybe there are more now, but I would be surprised if it was very much more. The UK system, with a larger population and more channels to cover, currently monitors just over 5,000 households.

Interestingly, in view of the question sometimes raised on Soompi (and ISTR in a couple of comments here, too) about whether watching KDramas via the live streams gets counted in the ratings (answer: no), the UK ratings body has announced that it will be including some households who watch (UK) TV via Internet streams in its sampling from 2010.