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ne thing is immediately clear: There is practically no overlap between the most-tweeted shows on TV and the highest-rated shows.

Seen through a Twitter lens, the No. 1 television show for the week of Sept. 23 to 29 was AMC’s “Breaking Bad” by a mile, with 9.28 million people seeing tweets about the show’s finale — but the episode wasn’t even among the top 20 in total viewership for the period, according to Nielsen primetime ratings.

But the divergence between the top shows Americans actually watch on TV and what they talk about on Twitter illustrates that there is not a strong correlation, today, between the two mediums. Only one show, two airings of NBC’s “The Voice,” appear in both top 10 rankings.

linear TV is not an even playing field. So it’s dangerous to conclude that a particularly buzzy TV show bombed in the ratings, and by extension, social media doesn’t influence viewership. Social TV’s influence complements TV but does not exceed it. If a show is buried on the schedule, it will likely fail regardless of the social TV ratings.

“TV binge-watching is a pandemic,” explains Slate. None of this viewing is considered — not to mention any DVR’d shows after 3 days — and viewers who discover shows via social media are often more inclined than the general population to watch in an unmeasured way

if you’re not investing in social, that silence doesn’t ensure you’ll stay at a ratings par, but that you’ll face an inevitable decline. If you’re not part of the conversation, if you’re absent from the social platforms where millions of TV viewers discover content — across all age groups on Facebook — then your mass media brands become less “mass” over time.

Nielsen says what is new here is determining “reach," the unique audience/impressions.

the entire Twitter TV audience for per episode is, on average, 50 times larger than the authors. If, for example, 2,000 people are tweeting about a program, 100,000 people are seeing those Tweets. Those 100,000 aren’t necessarily viewers of that particular TV episode.

Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings are a separate set of metrics to traditional National TV Ratings. They do not change traditional National TV Ratings. But many believe they will complement each other.

Nielsen Co. started labelling people in this group "Zero TV" households, because they fall outside the traditional definition of a TV home. There are 5 million of these residences in the U.S., up from 2 million in 2007

Unless broadcasters can adapt to modern platforms, their revenue from Zero TV viewers will be zero.

For the first time, TV ratings giant Nielsen took a close look at this category of viewer in its quarterly video report released in March. It plans to measure their viewing of new TV shows starting this fall, with an eye toward incorporating the results in the formula used to calculate ad rates.

networks for years have complained that total viewing of their shows isn't being captured by traditional ratings measurements. This is a move to correct that.

decision to expand beyond traditional TV ratings measurement came out of a meeting in New York on Tuesday of the What Nielsen Measures Committee, a group that has been meeting for nearly a year.

By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.

Still, you might say a revolution is brewing in the living room — and this one will be televised. It portends not only a change in the TV viewing experience but also poses a threat to cable and satellite TV distributors. Even network executives' notions about scheduling — how positioning a new show adjacent to a popular program in the evening lineup to drive ratings — look anachronistic at a time when Nielsen estimates that 47% of all American households have DVRs and can watch recorded shows whenever they choose, and 55% of broadband homes have at least one TV connected to the Internet, according to market researcher the Diffusion Group.

Concerns about how to reach this group known as the "never connecteds" and count their viewing in a show's ratings adds to a list of headaches that include slumping prime-time broadcast TV ratings and the flight of advertisers to cable.

these smart TVs may look dated compared with what Silicon Valley giant Intel has in store for later this year, not to mention whatever Apple Inc. is planning with its mysterious but hotly anticipated flat-screen TV.

Apple TV is reportedly developing ad-skipping technology so owners of a set-top box can watch shows commercial-free. The propsed deal with cable companies would reimburse programmers for skipped ads.

Google is really just hoping to beat Apple to the punch, despite the fact that the company already has its Apple TV streaming product on the market, according to The New York Times "Apple’s thinking… is that any next-generation television service must be set up in partnership with existing distributors, in part for quality assurance reasons. A future Apple service could include a user-friendly interface layered on top of Time Warner Cable or Cablevision’s channel lineup."

Adoption from the major networks is "very unlikely to support any service with their linear feed that allows for commercial messages to be skipped even if they get some form of compensation," Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer for WPP's GroupM, told AdAge. "This is not a viable economic model and subscribers to the system would not pay an adequate premium to compensate for it." 

ccording to Nielsen’s SocialGuide service, the heaviest Twitter activity appears to be happening during real-time programming minutes and not commercial breaks. After analyzing data culled from 59 broadcast and cable programs, SocialGuide concluded that nearly three-quarters (70 percent) of all airtime tweets were sent during the actual content.

when the spot load is light, the share of tweets issued during the breaks is also light. By the same token, when the programming is weighed down by multiple spots, the volume of tweets sent in commercial time rises proportionately.   

in some of the more compelling programs there are spikes in Twitter activity that coincide with significant plot moments

Seevibes created its own “Seevibes Score” — a composite score that consolidates data on market share, social impressions, loyalty levels, engagement rate, frequency, and level of response — to gauge how a show is performing socially. “The level of audience engagement with TV via social networks with television has surged by 500% year-after-year. This can make it difficult to compare broadcast numbers over time,” explains Maisonnave

“These social data points are giving us a new barometer for success or failure when we’re talking about engaging TV audiences,” says Youngling. “Content, both programmatic and advertorial, is now subject to an entirely new set of consumer-driven metrics. We talked about must-see TV back in the Seinfeld days, and now it’s evolving into the idea of must-comment TV.”

“Twitter didn’t have to train or persuade people to change their behavior,” says Bugbee of the network’s television chatter. “It just had to capitalize on what people were already doing. I think that’s why Twitter’s so powerful: it’s easy, it’s obvious, and it’s open.”

“For movies and retailers, time-shifting can be a concern,” says Starcom’s Bowe. “That is why live TV is interesting to a lot of TV advertisers. Advertisers are demanding immediacy. Amassing an audience on a particular night is important.” Combating ad skipping empowered by the DVR is a bigger issue for TV stations than it is for network TV.

Advertisers typically buy local TV using Nielsen’s live-only or live-plus-same-day program ratings. Network TV is bought on C3 commercial ratings, which includes live viewing and three days of DVR playback. That means local TV advertisers pay for viewers who fast-forward through their commercials.

Live TV and social media were made for each other. In 2013, 36 million people in the United States sent 990 million Tweets about TV shows they were watching live, according to Nielsen SocialGuide. Moreover, 84% of people who have smartphones or computer tablets use those devices while watching TV.

top Nielsen executive says the media ratings giant has begun working with its clients to “redefine” the very nature of the households it measures. The reason, Pat McDonough, senior vice president-insight and analytics at Nielsen, said Monday during the opening session of the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual Audience Measurement conference in New York, is that Americans increasingly are accessing video programming from non-traditional devices and in non-traditional ways.

Of the 6.3% of household video consumption that takes place, McDonough said about 3% each currently is being done either online or via mobile devices, and that other devices like video game consoles are rising fast. She said other big trends are the aging and the multicultural diversification of American households -- but despite all those trends, Americans are watching more video programming than ever before: an average of 35 hours per week.

“We are spending more time watching video than we are working,” McDonough added, alluding to average U.S. labor estimates.