Television Audiences Across the World

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Deconstructing the Ratings Machine: An Introduction

   1. Deconstructing the Ratings Machine: An Introduction

      • Jérôme Bourdon, Cécile Méadel

      Pages 1-30

3. Inventing Measurement

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 31-31

      PDF

   2. The Politics of Enjoyment: Competing Audience Measurement Systems in Britain, 1950–1980

      • Stefan Schwarzkopf

      Pages 33-52

   3. Still the British Model? The BARB versus Nielsen

      • Marc Balnaves

      Pages 53-68

   4. Canada’s Audience Massage: Audience Research and TV Policy Development, 1980–2010

      • Philip Savage, Alexandre Sévigny

      Pages 69-87

   5. The Monopoly that Won’t Divide: France’s Médiamétrie

      • Jérôme Bourdon, Cécile Méadel

      Pages 88-101

   6. Pioneering the Peoplemeter: German Public Service

      • Susanne Vollberg

      Pages 102-110

4. Appropriating Audience Figures

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 111-111

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   2. Power Games: Audience Measurement as a Mediation between Actors in India

      • Santanu Chakrabarti

      Pages 113-131

   3. Imagining Audiences in Brazil: Class, ‘Race’ and Gender

      • Esther Hamburger, Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, Tirza Aidar

      Pages 132-152

   4. From Referee to Scapegoat, but Still Referee: Auditel in Italy

      • Massimo Scaglioni

      Pages 153-163

   5. Domestication of Anglo-Saxon Conventions and Practices in Australia

      • Mark Balnaves

      Pages 164-178

   6. Market Requirements and Political Challenges: Russia between Two Worlds

      • Sergey Davydov, Elena Johansson

      Pages 179-195

5. Confronting Changes

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 197-197

      PDF

   2. The Role of Ratings in Scheduling: Commercial Logics in Irish Public Television

      • Ann-Marie Murray

      Pages 199-215

   3. The Local Peoplemeter, the Portable Peoplemeter, and the Unsettled Law and Policy of Audience Measurement in the United States

      • Philip M. Napoli

      Pages 216-233

   4. Challenges of Digital Innovations: A Set-Top Box Based Approach

      • Tom Evens, Katrien Berte

      Pages 234-247

   5. Thickening Behavioural Data: New Uses of Ratings for Social Sciences

      • Jakob Bjur

      Pages 248-263

6. Back Matter

   Pages 264-274

   PDF

This book is the first to deal with the world composition of television ratings. It focuses on the peoplemeter, a 25 year old technology which succeeds in homogenizing very different populations and television practices. It provides a fascinating account of the production of figures on which the whole world of popular culture depends.

• culture
• politics
• technology
• television
• media research

"This collection is a most comprehensive book on television ratings systems. It offers a remarkable breadth of case studies of nations from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These also include a wide variety of types of measurement practices and organizational structures. Such an array offers great opportunities for comparative analyses. Just as important, the book is theoretically, analytically and critically sophisticated. It examines the various critiques of audience measurement, such as the important distinction between substantive and procedural truths and the underlying assumptions in quantification and statistics about human behaviour and social relations." - Richard Butsch, Rider University, USA

"The book is an impressive collection of chapters which together provide a wide perspective of perspectives on audiences - and to that degree the book is truly unique - that captures the systems of audience measurement ultimately based on ratings of some kind as well as the scope of ensuing challenges to audience measurement ... this book is certainly a contribution to strengthening the foundation of the field and allowing for much more advanced discussions in the future." - Media Innovations, 2015

• Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University, Israel

  Jérôme Bourdon

• Mines ParisTech and Researcher, Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI), France

  Cécile Méadel

Tirza Aidar, University of Campinas, Brazil Mark Balnaves, University of Newcastle, Australia Katrien Berte, Centre for Information on the Media (CIM), the Belgian Joint Industry Committee Jakob Bjur, TNS-SIFO, Sweden Jérôme Bourdon, Tel Aviv University, Israel Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, University of São Paulo, Brazil Santanu Chakrabarti, Oxfam GB Sergey Davydov, National Research University, Russia Tom Evens, Ghent University, Belgium Esther Hamburger, University of São Paulo, Brazil Elena Johansson, Södertörn University, Sweden Cécile Méadel, Mines ParisTech, France Ann-Marie Murray, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Philip M. Napoli, Rutgers University, USA Philip Savage, McMaster University, Canada Massimo Scaglioni, Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy Stefan Schwarzkopf, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Alexandre Sévigny, MacMaster University, Canada Susanne Vollberg, Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Policies and ethics