Combining the Mac Mini, Apple TV, and Steve Job’s continually calling for an open DRM it is painfully obvious that Apple is working it’s way into our entertainment centers (to learn more read this). From a marketing perspective this is a dream come true, Apple keeps scrupulous records of every move we make in i-Tunes – with Apple TV those same data points will be applied to the consumption of television media.
Talking to media consumption reporting. I submit that Apple will not allow the Portable People Meter (PPM) to embed the PPM coded stream in their broadcast content, they will probably make up some excuse along the lines of the ‘the embedded stream will take up too much bandwidth.’ This would in turn render Arbitron and ACNeilsen helpless in collecting data. Also, the set top solution, like erinmedia or TNS, will most likely run into some sort of technology conflict as well. Nielsen will invariably turn back to their diary model which I mentioned in my prior post, with the advent of technology and the ever changing means of media consumption all of these are broken models.
I submit that to more wholly understand consumers media consumption we need to collect data from a representative sample size of the market. The representative sample size of the market do not all use Apple TV, cable boxes, nor are they willing to accurately fill out a hand written diary – which leaves marketers bribing Apple, trying to get erinmedia or TNS to market and operational, and paying exorbitant ACNielsen fees, only to try and get a whole picture of what is being consumed and where. However, only one of these solutions can track time shifting (tivo or slingbox are a couple of examples of time shifted viewing) and none of them can track consumption that takes place outside of the home. Which leaves us with an obvious gap in tracking media consumption.
