NEW YORK, March 12 /PRNewswire/ -- The Nielsen Company and Charter
Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: CHTR) announced today an agreement to
commercialize 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."
The Charter STB analyses will be available to Nielsen's clientele in
the second quarter of 2008.
About Charter Communications:
Charter Communications, Inc. is a leading broadband communications
company and the third-largest publicly traded cable operator in the United
States. Charter provides a full range of advanced broadband services,
including advanced Charter Digital Cable(R) video entertainment
programming, Charter High-Speed(R) Internet access, and Charter
Telephone(R). Charter Business(TM) similarly provides scalable, tailored,
and cost-effective broadband communications solutions to business
organizations, such as business-to- business Internet access, data
networking, video and music entertainment services, and business telephone.
Charter's advertising sales and production services are sold under the
Charter Media(R) brand. More information about Charter can be found at
http://www.charter.com.
About The Nielsen Company
The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with
leading market positions in marketing information (ACNielsen), media
information (Nielsen Media Research), online intelligence (NetRatings and
BuzzMetrics), mobile measurement, trade shows and business publications
(Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek). The privately held company is
active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in Haarlem, the
Netherlands, and New York, USA. For more information, please visit,
http://www.nielsen.com.
SOURCE The Nielsen Company
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Related links:
http://www.nielsen.com
http://www.charter.com
CONTACT:
Anita Lamont, for Charter Communications,
Inc., +1-314-543-2215; or Gary Holmes, for The Nielsen Company,
+1-646-654-8975
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