11 thoughts on “TiVo to give away viewership data in 2016”

  1. I think the bigger thing there is several links deep in that Comcast appears to be entering the competition with Nielsen. As much as everyone hates Comcast, their move will maybe make TV ratings less oriented on some small percentage of actual viewers. While Tivo has the potential to do the same, their market is somewhat in the middle of Nielson and Comcast…

    #BringBackFirefly

  2. It seems strange to me that a company that is obsessed with charging its customers monthly fees would turn around and give this data away for free.

    Maybe they’re just dipping their toes in the waters to see if there are opportunities for revenue streams for “premium” data? As a TiVo customer, I wouldn’t mind them selling my anonymized data if this meant lower monthly fees… I doubt that’s where this is headed, however.

  3. My concern would be that the data would not be truly anonymized. I’ve seen and heard that line before, but enough patterns emerge from “anonymous” data that you can then identify the person/household.

  4. They’ve been selling our data for years. What’s new is giving away some of the intel for free.

    By the by, they count 2m viewers – so, with fewer than 1m retail boxes in service, the data must also include stuff from their cable partners like RCN or Suddenlink. Or it could also be sourced via other relationships the TRA unit has.

  5. Good point, Dave. But, I still worry that the information that is disclosed may be used for less scrupulous reasons. Hopefully it is sufficiently scrubbed.

  6. This FREE service may provide companies that depend upon ratings and other related data to have an interest in seeing TiVo survive, and access to the data costs media companies nothing–except for whatever it might take collectively to keep TiVo afloat only for its gathering data. I don’t the media companies are going to help TiVo from going out of business.

  7. I assume the free data will just scratch the surface of what TiVo’s analytics group can produce — so while there may be a goodwill component, the ultimate goal is more visibility for the services they offer and selling that premium analysis.

  8. All this news takes us one step closer to how it was in MAx Headroom. In this day and age they should be getting real time data from a large sampling of people. Not the 20th century Neilsen way with tiny samples of people. I’m all for it even if my data wasn’t completely anonymous. I couldn’t care less if someone knows my viewing habits.

  9. Actually, I assume everybody already know everything about me. My job is to limit the damage if they should do something with that knowledge.

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