Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi wireless was a phony it's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television. This is episode 31 Countdown 76 Holy Writ for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, this podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027. That's the 100th anniversary of of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode we entered the golden age of television comedy with Sid Caesar and you'd show of shows.
Today we're going to start measuring the television audience.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1918 with a degree in electrical engineering, Arthur Charles Nielsen started his career in product testing.
In 1923, he launched the A.C. nielsen Company to apply scientific methods to measure consumer behavior and provide data driven insights into the company's product and marketing strategies.
Originally focused on testing things like floor wax, detergent and cereal sales, Nielsen began measuring radio audiences in the 1930s, just as the medium became a dominant cultural and economic force.
By capturing a representative sampling of what audiences were listening to, Nielsen could charge both broadcasters and sponsors for for something priceless numbers.
In 1936, Nielsen introduced the Autometer, a device placed in a select number of households attached to their radios to record what stations they listened to and when.
The data was stored on a rotating paper disc or film strip inside the device.
Starting in 1942, this data was compiled into the radio index that ranked the popularity of programs and stations.
Nielsen's only real competition in the 1930s and 40s was the Hooper Ratings. Created by Claude e. Hooper In 1934, this system employed banks of telephone surveyors who called households and asked, what are you listening to?
Hooper's method was fast and cheap, but seriously flawed. It relied too heavily on listeners memory, couldn't sample people without phones, and couldn't track actual tuning behavior.
The Hooper system was no match for Nielsen's autometer, which was a technical marvel in its day.
The autometer's automated tracking provided far more reliable data than Hooper's phone surveys and quickly became the industry standard for Broadcast ratings.
By the time Americans stopped staring at their radios and started gazing at glowing cathode ray tubes, Nielsen had a near monopoly on the ratings business and was ready to turn his own gaze and metrics toward the new frontier.
Likewise, the networks were desperate to prove television's viability to radio advertisers, who needed convincing before taking on the added expense.
The networks turned to Nielsen to justify the premium ad rates they wanted to charge for television.
Nielsen had the infrastructure. So when the networks, sponsors and Madison avenue needed him, A.C. nielsen was already in the catbird seat. In the spring of 1950, Nielsen retrofitted the autometer to detect which channel a TV set was tuned to.
As with radio, the channel switching data was recorded on film or paper and retrieved periodically by field agents.
Nielsen added another audience tracking innovation when they asked their registered households to keep a daily diary of viewer numbers and demographics. The result was a hybrid system that delivered the most reliable audience data available at the time.
The networks didn't just adopt AC Nielsen, they anointed him. His numbers became wholly writ, marking a pivotal moment in the ascent of American television.
The Nielsen ratings became the sun around which all the planets of television revolved.
Time slots, cancellations and renewals, writing, casting and directing were all governed by the numbers. In the world of television, a high Nielsen rating meant job security. A low rating meant unemployment.
With the Nielsen ratings as the shining beacon, the purpose of broadcasting was no longer to deliver programs to the viewers, but to deliver viewers to the advertisers.
In subtle ways, the ratings began to influence the content.
In their quest for the highest ratings, the networks created programs with the broadest possible audience appeal, in effect, programming for the lowest common denominator. And that programming was increasingly targeted toward the coveted 1849 demographic who bought most of what the advertisers were selling.
Nielsen's hybrid system, the autometer generated data combined with viewer diaries, remained the industry standard for decades, regardless of any lingering concerns about accuracy or reliability.
An improvement of sorts came in 1987 when Nielsen introduced the Peeble meter. The upgrade from the decades old otometer automated both tuning, detection and viewer data.
Each household member was assigned a button on a unit connected to the tv.
Viewers were instructed to press their button when they began watching and again when they stopped. This allowed Nielsen to collect demographic data in real time, reducing the reliance on memory and handwritten diaries.
With its origins in the 1950s, Nielsen's business was built for an industry dominated by three networks and a nationwide matrix of affiliated local stations.
Ironically, the people meter arrived just as that model reached its peak.
From the 1980s onward, television continued to evolve and Nielsen has struggled to maintain its relevance, let alone the monopoly like dominance it enjoyed for more than 30 years.
The rapid growth of cable TV in the 1980s fragmented the audience.
Now the once mighty networks had to compete with dozens of then hundreds of niche cable channels. Nielsen responded by refining its sampling, increasing its reporting frequency and tracking cable viewership.
The emergence of VCRs and DVRs further complicated the picture time shifting Through a wrench in the basic premise of real time audience measurement, Nielsen began tracking Live 3 or Live 7 metrics, accounting for those who watched within a few days of the original broadcast. But the genie was out of the bottle. Viewers were no longer tied to the broadcast schedule or the ratings.
With the dawn of viewing on demand services like Netflix, Nielsen devised tools to measure digital viewing. But the data is often incomplete or proprietary.
Unlike broadcasters, streaming platforms don't always publish their numbers, and when they do, they're quite opaque.
Nielsen has managed to endure and remains the industry standard for the network, local and cable businesses now lumped together under the rubric of linear or legacy television.
More recently, the company has begun to measure total audience, compiling a unified accounting across multiple platforms, broadcast, cable and streaming.
Regardless of its future, Nielsen's role in television's ascent is indisputable. For more than 70 years, the fate of television programs, their creators and the executives who scheduled them has depended on what a relatively small group of households happen to be watching on any given night.
That's the peculiar legacy of the Nielsens, a quiet, methodical power broker whose black box helped build a golden age of television, even as it helped define the medium.
This brings us to the end of number 76 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when we look at the role of cartoons on television in the 1950s.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7th, 2027.
For more aim a gizmo to 100 Years tv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:10:19] Speaker A: They all said we we never would be happy they laughed at us and how, but how, how, how good got your laughs?
