How do they calculate television rating?

Question

How do they determine the number of audiences viewing the program?

Answer 1

I'd like to know this also. I dont have much knowledge of this but i believe it has something to do with the stations reception signal somehow counting how many beams its recieving.

Answer 2

some families has something like decoders.they have extra features like saving the channels that how many minutes you watch them for.then send them to a center.so they calculate it.

Answer 3

One common rating (in the specific sense) is the rating of a national television show. This calculation measures the number of households--out of all the households in the United States that have TV sets--watching a particular show. There are approximately 92.4 million households in the United States and most of them have sets. In order to simplify the example, assume that there are 100,000,000 households. If 20,000,000 of them are watching NBC at 8:00 P.M. NBC's rating would be 20 (20,000,000/100,000,000=20). Another way to describe the process is to say that one rating point is worth 1,000,000 households.

Ratings are also taken for areas smaller than the entire nation. For example, if a particular city (Yourtown) has 100,000 households, and 15,000 of them are watching the local news on station KAAA, that station would have a rating of 15. If Yourtown has a population of 300,000 and 30,000 people are watching KAAA, the station's rating would be 10. And because television viewing is becoming less and less of a group activity with the entire family gathered around the living room TV set, some ratings are expressed in terms of people rather than households.

Many calculations are related to the rating. Sometimes people, even professionals in the television business, confuse them. One of these calculations is the share. This figure reports the percentage of households (or people) watching a show out of all the households (or people) who have the TV set on. So if Yourtown has 100,000 households but only 50,000 of them have the TV set on and 15,000 of those are watching KAAA, the share is 30 (15,000/50,000=30). Shares are always higher than ratings unless, of course, everyone in the country is watching television.

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