Brother Nielsen Is Watching

It seems like something out of George Orwell: television sets souped up so they can watch viewers watching them. Last week Nielsen Media Research, purveyor of the make-or-break TV ratings, announced plans to develop just such a gizmo. The "passive people meter," a computerized camera system, would sit atop sets in thousands of households, keeping an eye on every move that viewers made.

The purpose of the system, which will not be ready for deployment for at least three years, is to get a more objective, precise measure of who makes up the TV audience. In the past, viewers in Nielsen homes either filled out diaries or identified themselves by pushing buttons on hand-held consoles. With the new system, a computer would simply spot individual household members as they came into view and record them, second by second, as they faced the TV, read newspapers or merely turned their heads.

The soul of the new machine, developed in conjunction with the David Sarnoff Research Center, is the same basic technology used by U.S. missiles to distinguish between Soviet and American warplanes. A sensor scans the space in front of the TV searching for patterns of light and dark -- the shine of a nose, the line of a mouth -- that suggest the presence of a face. A computer then makes more detailed scans at higher and higher resolutions, trying to match facial features to those of family members stored in its memory. (An unfamiliar face would be recorded as a "visitor.") When the machine makes a match, the information is sent by phone lines to Nielsen's central ratings computer, and then to subscribers.

So far, the reaction of advertisers and broadcasters to Nielsen's new meter has been generally positive. With $25 billion in annual ad revenue at stake, the industry has an interest in accurate audience measurements. The one uncertainty, assuming the system works, is how viewers would react to the presence of a camera-like device in their homes. Nielsen officials take pains to point out that the machine would not transmit pictures -- only data about who is watching what.

NBC's Barry Cook, who heads a group that analyzes rating methods for the networks, is concerned that the sight of a camera on top of their TVs might make people self-conscious, affecting their viewing habits and skewing the results. And some would be sure to see in the new device a computer-age version of Big Brother's telescreen -- the two-way television that monitored the citizenry in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.