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.
Introduction; Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel PART I: INVENTING MEASUREMENT 1. The Politics of Enjoyment: Competing Audience Measurement Systems in Britain, 1950-1980; Stefan Schwarzkopf 2. Still the British Model? The BARB versus Nielsen; Marc Balnaves 3. Canada's Audience Massage: Audience Research and TV Policy Development, 1980-2010; Philip Savage and Alexandre Sévigny 4. The Monopoly that Won't Divide: France's Médiamétrie; Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel 5. Pioneering the Peoplemeter: German Public Service; Susanne Vollberg PART II: APPROPRIATING AUDIENCE FIGURES 6. Power Games: Audience Measurement as a Mediation Between Actors in India; Santanu Chakrabarti 7. Imagining Audiences in Brazil: Class, 'Race' and Gender; Esther Hamburger, Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, and Tirza Aidar 8. From Referee to Scapegoat, but still Referee: Auditel in Italy; Massimo Scaglioni 9. Domestication of Anglo-Saxon Conventions and Practices in Australia; Mark Balnaves 10. Market Requirements and Political Challenges: Russia Between Two Worlds; Elena Johansson and Sergey Davydov PART III: CONFRONTING CHANGES 11. The Role of Ratings in Scheduling. Commercial Logics in Irish Public Television; Ann-Marie Murray 12. The Local Peoplemeter, the Portable Peoplemeter, and the Unsettled Law and Policy of Audience Measurement in the US; Philip Napoli 13. Challenges of Digital Innovations: A Set-Top Box Based Approach; Katrien Berte and Tom Evens 14. Thickening Behavioral Data: New Uses of Ratings for Social Sciences; Jakob Bjur
