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 News From You
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Week ending June 14, 2008
Arbitron Inc. announced today that it will resume the commercialization of its Portable People MeterTM radio ratings service in eight markets.
“It’s time to move forward with electronic measurement for radio,” said Steve Morris, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Arbitron Inc. “Radio broadcasters and advertisers are taking bold steps in an effort to enhance the accountability of the medium. The Radio Advertising Bureau recently published guidelines for ‘posting’ and ad schedule guarantees and the American Association of Advertising Agencies continues to advance its e-business effort: ‘Project Reinvention.’ The Arbitron PPMTM is uniquely capable of delivering the granularity, precision and speed of reporting that can help radio make these and other accountability initiatives a success.”
“We have improved our PPM samples in the four key areas we outlined last November. We have enhanced our ability to deliver PPM sample targets. We’ve improved the composition of our PPM panels, especially among the 18-34 demographic. We’ve raised the day-to-day cooperation rate of our PPM respondents. We’ve also put in place a number of programs designed to have a positive impact on response rates. Our commitment to continuous improvement means that we will keep working on these metrics as we go forward.”
“In the past weeks, we have been meeting with our clients to review the progress that we’ve made since November and to hear their priorities for enhancements to our PPM services. Our conclusion from these meetings is that our PPM ratings are valid and the time is right for electronic measurement. Another outcome from these meetings is that we have established working groups across a number of constituencies within the radio industry to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the implementation of our continuous improvement programs for the PPM. At the same time, we are working diligently with the Media Rating Council in order to achieve MRC accreditation for all our PPM markets.”
“We are also seeing that radio operators who have embraced PPM are benefiting from PPM measurement. Over the past few months, there have been numerous reports in the trade press about urban and general market broadcasters who have successfully harnessed PPM ratings to advance their programming and sales efforts. We should not continue to let other media use their more advanced measurement systems to take audience and revenue away from radio,” said Mr. Morris.
Eight markets–New York, Nassau-Suffolk, Middlesex-Somerset-Union, Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Jose–will commercialize with the release of the September PPM survey report on October 8, 2008. On that date, the company’s diary-based radio ratings will be withdrawn from those eight markets and radio transactions among Arbitron-subscribing stations and agencies will take place solely using PPM-based radio ratings.
Arbitron will deliver “pre-currency” PPM survey reports for Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Chicago with a special release of the June PPM survey report in mid-July, and with the regular release of the July PPM survey report on August 13 and the August PPM survey report on September 10.
Arbitron will deliver “pre-currency” PPM survey reports for San Francisco and San Jose with the release of the July PPM survey report on August 13 and the August PPM survey report on September 10.
Pre-currency reports cannot be used in buy–sell transactions. Arbitron has released PPM pre-currency reports for New York, Nassau-Suffolk and Middlesex-Somerset-Union since October 2007.
Arbitron commercialized the PPM ratings service in Philadelphia in March 2007 and Houston-Galveston in July 2007. In addition, PPM technology is currently being used for radio and/or television measurement in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Canada, and Singapore.
In the revised PPM commercialization schedule released by Arbitron in November 2007, Arbitron indicated an expected commercialization of the Portable People Meter ratings service in Atlanta, Dallas–Ft. Worth, Detroit and Washington DC in December 2008. Arbitron is not altering that expectation at this time.
Pay TV and advertising revenues receive boost from ‘digital dividend’
New research from Informa Telecoms & Media shows that more than a third of TV homes in the Asia Pacific region will receive digital signals in 2013, up from just 13% at the end of 2007. The 12th edition of Informa’s Asia Pacific TV report shows that China overtook Japan as the biggest digital market during 2007 and will continue to increase in importance by accounting for more than half of the region’s digital total by 2013.
Adam Thomas, author of the report, said: “China’s sheer size makes it the region’s most eye-catching market, but there has been progress pretty much everywhere. At the end of last year the region had 75 million homes receiving digital signals. This is more than ten-times the 2001 figure and paves the way for even greater expansion over the next five years. Informa expects the number of digital homes to be approaching 250 million by 2013.”
Top 3 Markets: Digital TV households (000)
|
2007 |
% of total |
2013 |
% of total |
China |
27,324 |
36.4 |
123,330 |
50.1 |
India |
11,743 |
15.7 |
40,844 |
16.6 |
Japan |
19,893 |
26.5 |
35,741 |
14.5 |
Rest of region |
16,023 |
21.4 |
46,439 |
18.9 |
Total |
74,983 |
100 |
246,354 |
100 |
Source: Informa Telecoms & Media
Asia Pacific TV (12th edition) forecasts thatthe Asia Pacific region will boast 676 million TV households by 2013, an increase of 229 million since 1995. Thomas said: “With pay TV generating almost $50 billion and TV advertising worth a further $70 billion, the prospects for reward from the region’s TV business are impressive by anyone’s standards.”
Faced with the imminent closure of analog TV services, a growing number of Western Europeans are opting for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) as a replacement. Most DTT services are free-to-air (FTA) services, with no subscription and minimal hardware requirements: in the UK, for example, DTT set-top boxes are available for as little as £10, or just under $20.
However, pay-DTT in particular is carving out a niche in competition with other pay-TV offerings from cable and telco-based service providers in some markets. A new research brief from ABI Research finds that DTT’s market potential varies widely from country to country, depending on factors that include the availability of digital alternatives and the current reliance on analog terrestrial FTA TV.
“Some pay-DTT providers are positioning their service as a kind of ‘halfway house’ between free-to-air services and other forms of pay TV,” says senior analyst Cesar Bachelet. "They offer all the regular FTA programs, plus some premium content at an attractive price." One of the most interesting markets, Italy, is expected to show the strongest growth in DTT over the next five years, and pay-DTT is a leading component of that growth. It is attractive for several reasons including plenty of sports programming, but the main driver is the prevalence of "pay-as-you-go" (PAYG) services that don’t require a commitment to lengthy subscriptions.
“The pay-as-you-go model has a strong history in Italy in broadband and mobile telephone services, so the transition to pay-DTT is an easy one,“ notes Bachelet. “ABI Research believes PAYG DTT will prove popular in other European markets as well.”
Another important determinant of DTT’s success in a given market is the availability (or lack) of digital alternatives, and the level to which the population depends on analog terrestrial FTA television. In Belgium, for example, where most of the population gets its TV via cable, the migration to digital TV will primarily occur within the cable environment. So DTT is unlikely to gain much traction.
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