So far, I’m extremely happy and can deal with the ~60 sec commercial interruptions. I can also report that I do less mindless watching of TV. I used to have it on just to have it on and would become side tracked into watching a program and end up just watching and not doing anything. Now, I know that if I am going to watch something it’s something that I want to watch. I typically will turn on iTunes and have music playing from my own playlists which is so much better than the Music (non)Choice that they had.

When I was approached by them the only reason why I had a TV was because I got it for free (TV/VCR combo!) and had not turned it on in probably five years or so.  I used the money they gave me to buy a new TV :)

For the 2 months I need to be off comcast to qualify as a new customer I’ll have to stroll down to the library and use their wifi or use my smartphone. Now that I think about it, given the number of times I’ve helped my neighbor with his computer, he may be willing to let me leach off his wifi for 2 months.

Not that I know anything, but I was a contractor at the A.C. Nielsen research center when the people counting camera box was being developed and that was 20 years ago.

But yeah, when the signal’s good, I like having 2 hours of WKRP on Tuesday nights.

I couldn’t resist guessing what show could be so bad she couldn’t tell me.  Every time she pulled those instruments out of my mouth, I’d interject ‘ Japanese game shows?!’  ‘Soft porn?!’  ‘Anything on the Lifetime Channel?!’  But really, I ran out of guesses pretty quickly; it had been too long since I’d actually watched television and I didn’t surf those channels when we had access.  I’d always wondered who the audience was for *those* channels.  It’s the friend (we socialize) using sharp, pointy dental tools on my teeth. Good to know.

The number of ‘cord cutters’ who are actually falling off the grid and just never watching anything is, indeed, relatively minor(and probably not wildly different from hardline TV holdouts from decades past). It’s just that ‘cord cutters’ generally aren’t actually cutting any cords, they are just moving onto the internet, which now features ‘video’(as Nielson would probably learn by talking to Realnetworks, just to avoid future shock).

Once on the internet, Nielson’s traditional expertise in audience metrics-gathering is somewhere between ‘pitiful’ and ‘actively hilarious’ compared to that of the players who have the advantage of experience(and, often, being the sender of the video).

Nielson doesn’t know what those crazy ‘cord cutters’ are watching; but Netflix probably knows what they watch, when they watch it(and on what devices), how often, and for how long, when and how long they paused while watching, what they abandoned watching halfway through, etc, etc, etc. Hulu probably knows similar things, for their catalog, and Google and friends probably know creepy amounts about the youtube and the rest of the internet; while Facebook and Twitter probably have all kinds of cute graphs and numbers concerning ‘audience engagement’, anticipation, discussion-of-X-show-or-ad-among-peers, etc.

In that context, Nielson is an archaism sitting behind a wooden desk, thumbing through its rolodex and asking its secretary to fire up the typewriter and take some notes.

The TV and Cable guys, while they certainly don’t like the piratical edge of some internet denizens, at least have the pretty fundamental advantages of owning a variety of ‘content’, some of the faster consumer-grade internet connections in oligopolistic markets throughout the US, and some seriously desirable RF spectrum. Nielson, dunno, maybe their HQ is in a nice location and worth selling off?