Journalism, addressable TV and measurability of audiences: a legislative proposal

Abstract

The television medium, which resists the push of the Internet as an advertising medium and maintains the leadership in audience numbers, is no stranger to the debate on how to measure, in a technically adequate and efficient way, the audiences it achieves. The progressive penetration of the HbbTV (Hybrid Broadband Television) standard as a form of interactive television in homes opens new journalistic perspectives breaks the traditional patterns of audience measurement as much as it supposes the union between the Internet and audiovisual, so that, in interactive contents, the viewer can derive towards online content. In addition, the possibility of directing personalized content to them (Addressable TV) means that the measurement of who, when and where you watch television is complicated and requires new methods to do so. The new global paradigm that opens with these changes provokes allegations, such as the control of the duration of the visit to an announcement, and new debates about the control of audiences, since it can be considered a unique visit, or segment the audiovisual metrics of the from Internet. This quantitative research analyzes the data of a survey on HbbTV (Interactive TV) in Spain, in which professionals of the sector are questioned about the way forward to some of these debates. It is concluded that the data obtained by visit must be measured in an integrated manner, but that the minutes of follow-up through the Internet must be defined according to the rules of minutes per hour of television advertising.