TiVo to Measure TV and Online Viewing

TiVo  (NASDAQ:TIVO) announced on Monday that it will start monitoring how much time is spent by users viewing Web content on their TV sets along with regular television programming. The study seeks to offer feedback on consumers’ viewing habits, and should prove valuable for advertisers  looking to track how much time is spent on certain programs and ads.

TiVo subscribers will be allowed to watch traditional television while they stream online content to their TVs, such as Netflix and YouTube. The roll-out of the monitoring service is expected to heat up competition between TiVo and Nielsen, which plans to include online viewing into its statistics in February of 2011.

Advertisers are expected to be interested in TiVo’s data because it gathers viewer statistics by the second and tracks around 375,000 homes. Advertisers interested in finding out when people turn on or off their commercials could benefit greatly from the statistics.