Television setThis is one of those questions that has bothered me a bit for a while until I found the answer, now I am more bothered. Think about the question before I give you the answer. How do TV broadcasters report that say 10 million people watched a certain soap opera on TV yesterday?

Although Television sets do emit an electromagnetic signature which is used by detector vans, this is a local event and broadcasters cant measure all of the TV sets in a set country at once. When asking friends about this I got a variety of responses. One of them is that some TVs are implanted with a special device that sends the data to the broadcasters, but the flaw to this is that TV ratings have been happening for many decades, before such technology was viable. Another response is that a sample of people are phoned up and asked what they are watching, but surely, at least one of the people I have spoken to about this subject would have received at least one phone call in their life time asking what they were watching?

The actual answer is a combination of both possibilities suggested above. Apparently, using a variety of methods a small (supposedly representative) proportion of the population is asked to record the results of what they watched. My problem with this is that these results can never be 100% accurate. Similar methods are used to predict the winner of a presidential race, and as we have seen these figures can be manipulated or miscounted. I was really hoping there was a hi tech explanation to this question -  indeed some people do apparently have devices inside their televisions to report what they are watching, but its not the answer I was hoping for.

I would be interested to know if anyone has been part of a rating survey. If so, please leave a comment below.