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Television Audiences Across the World

Deconstructing the Ratings Machine

  • Jérôme Bourdon
  • Cécile Méadel
Book

Table of contents

  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
      PDF
    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

About this book

Introduction

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.

Keywords

culture politics technology television

Editors and affiliations

  • Jérôme Bourdon
    • 1
  • Cécile Méadel
    • 2
  1. 1.Department of CommunicationTel Aviv UniversityIsrael
  2. 2.Mines ParisTech and ResearcherCenter for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI)France

Bibliographic information