A screen shows a Netflix series, The Killing.Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Imageshide caption
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Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images
For decades, one company has pretty much had the monopoly on TV ratings: Nielsen. But, the way people watch TV is changing. A lot of fans are streaming shows from the Internet — not watching on cable TV.
Old-fashioned Nielsen ratings wouldn’t show the habits of a family like Kevin Seal’s.
“We do not follow the appointment viewing, wait-for-the-show-to-come-on-at-a-given-time schedule,” says Seal, who lives in San Francisco with his wife and six-year-old son. “We watch a lot of Netflix programming — recently Black Mirror was the one that we devoured in its entirety.”
The failure of Nielsen to reveal data about the habits of family’s like the Seals has opened the way for a startup called Symphony, which is tracking TV watching in all its forms.
It is actually easier to track what people stream over the Internet. But Amazon and Netflix don’t release those numbers. Those companies say the numbers aren’t important because they don’t sell ads — they sell subscriptions. As long as people can find shows they want to watch they will keep subscribing.
But media researcher Bill Harvey says for the people who actually produce the programming the number of viewers remains very important. The producers of a show like Black Mirror are at a disadvantage in price negotiations with Amazon or Netflix. “The price paid by a distributor to a program source is less, based on the assumption that the audience is smaller,” Harvey says.
And he says the companies that make the programming for TV also don’t look as good in the eyes of Wall Street. Harvey says that, according to Nielsen’s measurement system, overall TV viewership is down. But if you were really to measure how much TV is being watch on streaming, that may turn out to be false.
“Younger people are doing less and less of the old-fashioned TV viewing and much more of the newfangled TV viewing that Nielsen isn’t measuring,” Harvey says.
Symphony has developed a tracking system that uses a smartphone app, which so far is on the phones of more than 15,000 people. It works a little like Shazam, the app that can detect which song is playing. Symphony runs in the background all the time and participants promise to have their phone on and with them when they view. Charles Buchwalter, CEO of Symphony, says each TV program has a code that the app can identify from the audio.
I’m a fan of the sci-fi show Humans, which I watch on Amazon. If I had the app on my phone, Symphony would know I was a viewer, Buchwalter says. “The app knows that this is the audio code that Laura’s listening to,” he says, “and then we are matching that to a reference database of all programs out there and it says Laura is watching Humans.”
I usually watch Humans on my iPad, and Symphony knows that too. That’s very important information to NBC Universal, which uses Symphony, says Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s senior vice president of research.
“Folks have migrated to watching a great deal of video content on non-Nielsen-measured devices, like smartphones, like tablets,” he says. “And when you reaggregate all those numbers they basically come right back to where they’ve always been.”
Wurtzel says people are watching as much TV as ever, though he doesn’t have enough data to prove it.
NPR’s TV critic Eric Deggans says there’s some evidence that Nielsen may be setting itself up to publicly track non-traditional TV viewing. He notes that earlier this year Nielsen revealed that it has been collecting some data on streaming-only shows from Netflix including Orange is the New Black.
“But they’re only sharing that information with select clients,” he says. “So it’s hard for journalists and critics and the public to know exactly who’s watching what.”
And while this information is important to the producers of TV, Deggans says viewers like to know about it too. “If a bunch of other people are watching a show you might want to check it out,” he says.
Ultimately, Deggans says, TV producers have a stake in seeing a company like Symphony succeed. Nielsen has been a monopoly in the world of TV ratings. “If Nielsen is the only place that gives you the ratings … then they can charge you as much as they can charge you,” Deggans adds.
But Symphony might give producers a little negotiating power. And if Symphony’s technology turns out to be accurate, it may also put pressure on Nielsen to do a better job tracking how Americans are engaging in their decades-old pastime of watching TV.
A court has blocked a new rule created by the Department of Health and Human Services that would preserve the right of patients and families to sue nursing homes in court. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Imageshide caption
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Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
A federal district court in Mississippi has issued an injunction blocking a new rule that would preserve the right of patients and their families to sue nursing homes over quality-of-care disputes.
The rule, announced in September by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, would ban so-called pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts, which require patients and families to settle any dispute over care through arbitration, rather than the court system.
The rule was supposed to take effect Nov. 28, but the American Health Care Association, an industry group that represents most nursing homes in the U.S., filed a lawsuit in October to block the rule, which it called “arbitrary and capricious.”
The acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services argued in a September blog post that the rule improved the “care and safety of the nearly 1.5 million residents in the more than 15,000 long-term care facilities that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
As we have reported, the rule applies to facilities that receive money from Medicare or Medicaid — which is nearly all of them.
The lawsuit by the AHCA also contests the authority of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to regulate how nursing homes handle disputes, saying that authority lies solely with Congress.
On Monday, a federal district court granted the injunction, even as it acknowledged that “nursing home arbitration litigation suffers from fundamental defects.”
The reason for granting the injunction, the court explained in its order, is that it believes the new rule represents “incremental ‘creep’ of federal agency authority” — in this case the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — “beyond that envisioned by the U.S. Constitution.”
Hanan Abu Qassem is the first female EMT to staff professional soccer games in Gaza. Lauren Frayer/NPRhide caption
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Lauren Frayer/NPR
Thousands of soccer fans chant and beat drums in the stands. An announcer narrates, on live radio, the start of the match.
Players from Gaza’s top soccer league sprint and dive for the ball. Going for a header, two players collide — and one lands on the leg of the other.
What happens next has never happened in Gaza before: A woman in a pink Muslim headscarf dashes out from the sidelines. She’s there to treat the player whose leg was injured.
In the West Bank and Gaza, female doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians have worked pretty much everywhere their male counterparts do — except at soccer games. These are all-male events, often rowdy, which until now have used all-male medical teams — just as in much of the world. It’s rare to see a female sports trainer at La Liga matches in Spain, for example, or even in England’s Premier League.
But after another Arab country, Jordan, began employing female EMTs at its soccer games this year, Gaza followed suit.
“They have a problem that a female can touch the male [body] and do first aid,” says Hanan Abu Qassem, 28, who in October became the first female EMT to staff professional soccer games in Gaza. She was the one in the pink veil who sprinted onto the field to treat the player with the injured leg. “But it’s something ordinary for me.”
Hanan Abu Qassem motions from the sidelines of a top division professional soccer game in Gaza, poised to treat injured players. Abu Qassem is the first female EMT to staff such games in the Gaza Strip. Lauren Frayer/NPRhide caption
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Lauren Frayer/NPR
She’s an experienced EMT, having treated victims of Israeli bombs during the 2014 Gaza war. Compared to that, soccer sprains and scrapes were supposed to be straightforward — more pleasant work, she says.
But at her first game last month, she and a female colleague were booed by the crowd — and lambasted on social media. Male soccer fans, offended by their presence, took their complaints to Gaza’s soccer federation, which told Abu Qassem she might be locked out of future games because of the backlash, and for her own safety.
The backdrop of all this is an ongoing political struggle between the Islamist group Hamas, which governs Gaza, and Fatah, the party that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is seen as more liberal. Injured players are treated by municipal EMTs here, who aren’t required to be affiliated with any political party. They provide all medical care at soccer games, unlike in America or Europe, where private sports trainers, employed by individual teams, are often the first responders.
Hanan Abu Qassem (left) treats Kamal Bahoum (right), a soccer fan injured during scuffles at the gate to Gaza’s main soccer stadium. The presence of female EMTs at the soccer games has stirred controversy, and Abu Qassem has been warned she may be barred from future games. Lauren Frayer/NPRhide caption
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Lauren Frayer/NPR
“If I cannot enter the field, I may be crying,” Abu Qassem says. “Because I have ambition. I’m anxious to be a very famous EMT.”
She is already, because of this controversy. Before one recent match, as NPR accompanied her, guards initially prevented the ambulance Abu Qassem was riding in from entering Gaza’s main soccer stadium. Amid scuffles and yelling, they acquiesced after the head of the Palestinian EMT Association intervened.
“I’m surprised to see a woman doing this job!” says soccer fan Kamal Bahoum, 59, with a white beard. He was injured during the chaos at the stadium gate as he tried to get in, and went to Abu Qassem in search of a bandage for his bleeding hand. In the end, he had no qualms about getting medical treatment from a woman, he said.
At the game NPR attended, there were no boos directed toward Abu Qassem — but there were stares. She says she dressed more conservatively than she does most other days, wearing a pink headscarf and a long, loose-fitting black robe with a reflective vest over it.
Only three women appeared to be present in the entire stadium of thousands — Abu Qassem, a female sports journalist, and this NPR reporter.
Many of the crowds at the soccer games Abu Qassem staffs are all-male, like this one from a recent professional soccer match in Gaza City. Lauren Frayer/NPRhide caption
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Lauren Frayer/NPR
“As female journalists, we face the same problems that they face,” says Sabah Ahmed, a reporter for a Gaza sports website. “But day by day, the people start to deal with us. They are welcoming us. Actually, I’m surprised.”
Abu Qassem ends up riding in the ambulance to the hospital with the player who hurt his leg. Turns out it was broken. She says she sat by his hospital bedside as he cried — not out of pain, but out of fear his soccer career would be over.
Later that night, local TV stations in Gaza replay — over and over again — footage of the player’s injury, with his leg bent at an unnatural angle. It shows him being carried off the field on a stretcher. The report doesn’t say who treated him.
But if you pause and look closely, you can spot a hot pink hijab in the background.
