1. "Battlestar Galactica" (59.4)
2. "Mad Men" (57.7)
3. "Damages" (56.3)
4. "Rescue Me" (53.2)
5.(tie) "True Blood" (46.9)
5.(tie) "Stargate Universe" (46.9)
7.(tie) "Sanctuary" (45.9)
7.(tie) "Heroes" (45.9)
9. "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (45.5)
10.(tie) "10 Things I Hate About You" (44.9)
10.(tie) "Dollhouse" (44.9)
10.(tie) "Melrose Place" (44.9)

Other than a couple of tween-driven clunkers at the bottom of the list—and the people who forgot to take "Heroes" off their DVR in 2007—this is a comprehensive list of some of the best, least watched TV of the year. Which makes sense, given the way the ratings are structured. A million people DVRing "Mad Men" is going to make a much bigger difference to that show's time-shifted rating than a million people DVRing "American Idol." So what you're left with is essentially ten shows with passionate, technologically savvy fan bases. Though it looks like in a couple of these cases, not quite passionate enough to save the show from extinction. Sorry, "Dollhouse." I should've done more to spread the word. [NY Times]

Here's how messed up the Billboard rankings were in the pre-electronic days: It used rankings, not actual sales numbers, assumed all albums on the chart had equal spacing between them, no matter how big the gap really was. So, whether a number one album sold just 10 or 10,000 more copies than the number two album, it showed up the same. And on top of only tracking the US and Canada—so not worldwide figures—SoundScan has no data pre-1991.

For what it's worth, Sony and the RIAA peg Jackson's Thriller's sales at 55 million, though Jackson's management says it's more like 100 million. The RIAA says he's sold 61.5 million albums through his career. And those numbers don't include the digital explosion over the last couple weeks. (He held 9 out of the top 10 albums on iTunes after his death.) Other mythical albums sales figures are a lie too, conflating songs and albums: The Beatles haven't sold a billion albums, AC/DC hasn't topped 200 million.

What a far cry from iTunes today: It not only tracks every song and album you buy, it tells you songs you might like based on what you buy after comparing it to what everybody else is buying, and songs you might wanna listen to based on what you already have. We have far too many numbers now. [WSJ]

Content owners can leverage the popularity of new media distribution channels by identifying what content is being shared, viewed, mashed up or accessed. This intelligence enables content owners to make meaningful decisions on what content to allow or disallow on such sites.

The sample size will be 20,000 homes, which for now is comprised of volunteers enticed into letting loose their persona details by a raffle offering the chance to win a free Tivo. The group is six times larger than Nielsen's sample of 3,000. It's also one-upping Nielsen in that it "will offer marketers the opportunity to survey some of its users via an online poll to ask deeper questions about their viewing habits and their feelings about both the ads and the marketers."

Though the info brigade is all-volunteer for now, Tivo's considering allowing advertisers to compare their customer database's with Tivo's, "which would help the advertisers see in greater detail how people's viewing habits affect their purchases." It's increasingly looking like your lifetime subscription might guarantee you Tivo for life, but it's sure not going to guarantee your privacy for that long. [WSJ (sub req'd)]

Because DVRs make skipping over commercials so easy, Nielsen is now rating commercials themselves, based in part on how often people stop fast-forwarding and watch them. According to a New York Times report, DVRs have also affected show ratings themselves: after a single night, a show like How I Met Your Mother might have a 2.7, but by the end of the week, when everyone with a DVR has watched it, the rating might be much higher, at 4.1. The trouble is, both of these new ratings take weeks to process.

There here are some issues that the article didn't mention, though.

1) What about dual-tuner DVRs? On a Sunday night, I can watch Family Guy and Cold Case, even though they are on opposite one another. Since DVRs in general only make up about 20 percent of the viewing audience, it may not be significant yet, but that's going to really screw up ratings as we know it.

2) What about the DVR providers? TiVo and the like must have ridiculous realtime information about who watches what and which commercials are funny enough to stop for. Nielsen has a pretty elaborate system that has worked for networks and advertisers for many years, but TiVo or the cable co's could walk in with a few realtime charts and shut that thing down quick, right?

Maybe part of the reason TiVo has lasted so long through thick and thin is that it gets serious Nielsen consulting fees. [NYT]

This week, the Blu-ray camp is reclaiming some lost ground on the battlefield of public opinion.

Reporters are citing research by Home Media Magazine that says Blu-ray movies outsold HD DVD movies 70% to 30% in the first quarter of this year. (The research was apparently backed up by Nielsen VideoScan data.)

In addition, Wired's Gadget Lab ran an article with this fairly jingoistic headline: "Let the Price War Begin: Pioneer Announces $300 Blu-Ray Player". It turns out, the "player" is actually a BD read-only PC drive that's available in China and, they suggest, assorted gray-market vendors.

Highlighting the ambiguity was last Friday's coverage by TG Daily's Mark Raby. At around noon, Raby posted a news story entitled "Blu-ray edges out HD DVD yet again". By 5:30, however, he went with an opinion piece, "Blu-ray not even close to winning format war". Is this bet-hedging doublespeak? Not at all. If you think about it, there's no contradiction at all, just understandable confusion.

I say we find out the winner of this mess right around the time that we learn who will be the next US president. What do you say? – Wilson Rothman

Blu-ray vs. HD DVD [Gizmodo]

Motorola users, for example, were deemed stylish, fun seekers whereas Nokia folks were healthy and middle-aged. What did the rest of the survey say, hit the jump for the full results. Let's just say I'm glad I don't own an LG phone.

Nokia Family-minded Middle aged managers Health conscious

Motorola
Fashion conscious
Under 24
Fun seekers

Sony Ericsson
Ambitious young men
Professionals
Success driven

Samsung
Young women
Career focused
Success drivers

LG
Stay at home parents
Moms

Mobiles Maketh the Man and Woman [Sydney Morning Herald via Crave]

Blu-ray has outsold HD DVD by more than 2 to 1. (Score 1 Blu-ray). It's not sure whether the Blu-ray boost came via the PS3 or if it was simply a lack of new HD DVD titles—either way, it looks like Blu-ray fans have reason to celebrate cause at this rate it shouldn't be difficult to keep the lead. – Louis Ramirez

Nielsen/VideoScan Sales Ratios [AVS Forum]

Worst-case scenario: The panel is an early indication that TV and movies have limited appeal on iPods. Best-case scenario: While adoption of video may be proceeding more slowly than the hype suggests, there is tremendous upside ahead.

My impression of watching video on a small screen? It depends on how small that screen is and how desperate you are to be entertained. I've noticed that I have a personal threshold for the smallness of video that I can still enjoy. I tried a few different screen sizes in my informal field test, traveling half-way around the world and watching a lot of video. Along for the ride I had a Motorola Q which has a 2.25-inch 4x3 screen, an Archos 404 with a 3.5-inch 4x3 screen, and a Sony PSP with a 4.25-inch widescreen.

On a screen the size of the Motorola Q's, it's extremely hard to enjoy any sort of cinematic content, because it's just too damn small. Trying to watch a football game in Los Angeles that I was receiving via EVDO using SlingPlayer Mobile was an exercise in futility, where the players all looked like tiny ants running around on the screen. About the only thing a screen that size is useful for is getting some talking-heads news information or something very simple. Either way, it's hardly worth the trouble.

Moving up to the next larger-size screen, the Archos 404's 3.5-inch 4x3 screen was almost big enough for watching 4x3 content, but still leaves me wanting when watching letterboxed movies. It just seems like a waste of perfectly good video content to watch it on a screen that's just 3.5 inches diagonal. The Archos screen had an unusually shallow viewing angle, not good if you want to watch a video with a friend. But this could have an upside, too—you won't bother your prudish seatmate if you want to pull out that porn vid you've been meaning to watch but just haven't gotten around to.

The Sony PSP is a different story. Its 16x9 screen is exceedingly sharp and is just big enough to enjoy movies. Of course, if you get suckered into buying a movie on the brain-dead UMD format, there is an upside to that: its video is exceedingly crispy-sharp. Even ripped movies from DVDs look like HDTV on this beautiful little screen. Watching movies on the PSP was far more pleasurable than with the other two examples I tried, and the audio sounds great with a decent pair of earphones, making me almost forget I was flying in a pressurized tin can six miles above the planet.

I did notice that the more desperate I got to be entertained on these interminably long flights (one was 18 hours long), the easier it was to tolerate the smaller screens. Plus, if the movie I was watching was really good, I could get so absorbed in the content that it didn't matter much that I was only watching on a small screen. But this is only true with the PSP. Anything smaller than 4 inches, in my opinion, gets to be annoying to watch after a while, no matter what.

One other note: I found myself constantly wishing for some sort of stand or easel that could hold up each of these players on the tray table, because it gets tiresome to hold a player in your hand for hours on end while watching long movies.

Plus, when loading up the players with video, it's quite an arduous process to convert a DVD into a movie that can be viewed on them, but that's getting easier all the time, too.

Summing up, I believe there is a big market for location-shifting using portable video players, because people are sometimes desperate for entertainment. Plus, the threshold of pain varies from user to user; your mileage may vary. – Charlie White

Study: iPod video yet to play big [Hollywood Reporter]

In related news of Nielsen joining the 21st century, they also announced a plan to end the paper diaries that they are still used in select markets with their television rankings during sweeps. Good for you, Nielsen. Welcome to the world. – Travis Hudson

Nielsen to gauge TV viewing on Web, mobile devices [Reuters]