by Andrew Redfern @ 12th March 2008 3:14 pm

The Nielsen Company and Charter Communications, announced today an agreement to commercialise the use of anonymous digital set top box (STB) data for analytical and potential audience measurement purposes for television.

As part of this agreement, Charter is providing Nielsen with anonymous STB viewing data from almost 330,000 households in the Los Angeles area, which Nielsen will develop into commercially available analyses and reports of digital television viewership.

To protect customers’ privacy and maintain the confidentiality of their viewing preferences, Charter will only provide data in an anonymous form to prevent Nielsen from identifying the personal information or identity of any individual Charter customer. Similarly, all Nielsen reports will contain only anonymous and aggregated data.

This research will be the first time that census-level tuning data and panel-based people meter viewing data will be combined to produce expanded household and demographic reporting from a local television market.

“Charter is committed to improving the precision of local market measurement,” said Jim Heneghan, Senior Vice President, Advertising Sales for Charter. “By working with Nielsen, we are ensuring that our advertiser and agency clients get the most reliable data possible to evaluate their media buys.”

“At a time of rapid technological change in the television industry, Nielsen is inventing new ways to measure how people watch television,” said Jed Meyer, Senior Vice President of Nielsen DigitalPlus.

“Through these studies, we will provide Charter with new insights on the consumption of all digital video. At the same time, we will be investigating the potential of digital set top boxes and the data they generate to enhance our existing audience measurement services.”

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