You sit down to watch a show at 9 after a long day at the office, you turn on the TV, select a program that seems promising, and settle in with your tablet to check up on your social media network and the news. After a while, you shift slightly on the couch seat and put the tablet to the side and relax your posture. After another 30 minutes your head nods slightly to the side and you catch your thoughts straying gently into a dream. To traditional media measurement you are a dedicated viewer paying rapt attention to 1.5 hours of broadcast television while the reality is you were asleep.
The recent development of the Sony Kinect has the potential to change this dynamic. The Sony Kinect is a camera interface developed to record player's motions and translate it into action on the screen. Without getting too far into the technical details it converts the image human figures into a stick diagram and interprets the motions. Someday this will give us the Tom Cruise Minority Report type interactive displays, but for the moment it has a number of serious applications it can be put to. The Kinect also has a very active aftermarket Hacker community working on repurposing the device for a multitude of uses meaning we haven't even started to see the full potential of the device.
This technology has the potential to enhance, and also disrupt, todays broadcast media measurement. Today's technology relies on viewer diaries, set top box measurement, or tracking of online streaming. Each presents special limitations on data and are imperfect in their measurement, but all have room for improvement. The Kinect presents three distinct areas for improvement of media measurement.
1. The Kinect can measure viewer motion in the home, and therefore, estimate behavior. In the example above it can tell media measurement companies the number of people using a second screen during their viewing. It also would let the measurement company know that people get up to use the bathroom or make a sandwich during How I Met Your Mother re-runs but stay riveted in their seats during Sporting Events. It can also tell us that viewers tend to fall asleep during mid day airings of the price is right.
2. The Kinect can solve the longstanding problem of measuring large audiences in a public place. Measuring audiences in public venues has been difficult due to inability to measure who is in the room. It's unlikely that with current technology it will be possible to measure viewer behavior at a granular level, but it will provide a directional view on how much motion their is in the room.
3. More accurate measurement of viewer identification. The diary measurement system offers us an approximation of viewership and demographics which is imperfect. The tracking of people coming and going could be a quality control tool to improve demographic mesurement diaries.
he potential downside is the creepiness factor of being watched while watching TV. However, if the device was targeted at specific sampling of viewers already disposed to sharing information in Nielsen diaries, it may be an easier sell. Additionally, as it's only tracking motion and not photo realism the intrusion is not as great. Still, many privacy concerns would have to be addressed to prevent a 1984 style Big Brother is watching you dynamic.
The technology of the Kinect is still in it's infancy and the ideas presented above are just a starting point. It represents a potential land shift in how media markets work in the future.
