> 1. Do you know which shows are most popular? (is there any counter or anything similar to the Nielsen ratings?)
Nielsen and the other companies that track viewership (as a service for networks and advertisers) only provide that service for commercial channels. PBS Channels, Public Access Channels, Government Channels, and even big national networks like LinkTV (on DirectTV) or FreeSpeech TV (On Dish Network) are excluded from their records.
This is part of the reason that we are so excited about the voting model. We can track what shows get votes, what times are most popular, and so on. We're trackign this on a limited scale (see "watch and vote" on our website) but we don't expect the voting process to really kick in for another few months, as we just now got the bandwidth we need this week. Next week we're working on encoding all the shows we have and putting them on our web-server, and within a few weeks we should have them all searchable.
Then, we have to get more prompts up on the channels, reminding people before and after each show that they can log in and vote. By next year, we expect to be collecting significant vote data.
> 2. Can you tell me about your overall viewership?
Denver Open Media is on Comcast in about 120,000 paying households in Denver and Glendale only (not including pirated cable, which is estimated by the industry at nearly 10% of viewers). Our predecessors estimated over 300,000 individuals have our channels in their home (Denver Census averages 2.4 people per household). We can't calculate viewership, but it has been said that Public Access is popular with channel-surfers, especially considering that Basic Cable Subscribers only have 30 channels, 3 of which are ours, so if they're flipping, they're hitting us 10% of the time. (note, one of our channels is slated to move from the Basic Tier to the Digital Tier in the Summer of 2007).
We're working with the city of Denver on a "community ascertainment" process that will begin at the end of this year, and track the people of Denver's use of Government, Education and Public Access viewing through questionnaires and polling. That, together with increased voting participation should provide us with some useful numbers concerning viewership by mid 2008.
Nielsen and the other companies that track viewership (as a service for networks and advertisers) only provide that service for commercial channels. PBS Channels, Public Access Channels, Government Channels, and even big national networks like LinkTV (on DirectTV) or FreeSpeech TV (On Dish Network) are excluded from their records.
This is part of the reason that we are so excited about the voting model. We can track what shows get votes, what times are most popular, and so on. We're trackign this on a limited scale (see "watch and vote" on our website) but we don't expect the voting process to really kick in for another few months, as we just now got the bandwidth we need this week. Next week we're working on encoding all the shows we have and putting them on our web-server, and within a few weeks we should have them all searchable.
Then, we have to get more prompts up on the channels, reminding people before and after each show that they can log in and vote. By next year, we expect to be collecting significant vote data.
> 2. Can you tell me about your overall viewership?
Denver Open Media is on Comcast in about 120,000 paying households in Denver and Glendale only (not including pirated cable, which is estimated by the industry at nearly 10% of viewers). Our predecessors estimated over 300,000 individuals have our channels in their home (Denver Census averages 2.4 people per household). We can't calculate viewership, but it has been said that Public Access is popular with channel-surfers, especially considering that Basic Cable Subscribers only have 30 channels, 3 of which are ours, so if they're flipping, they're hitting us 10% of the time. (note, one of our channels is slated to move from the Basic Tier to the Digital Tier in the Summer of 2007).
We're working with the city of Denver on a "community ascertainment" process that will begin at the end of this year, and track the people of Denver's use of Government, Education and Public Access viewing through questionnaires and polling. That, together with increased voting participation should provide us with some useful numbers concerning viewership by mid 2008.