New "TV Lab" to Explore the Future Value of Television 22/08/00 ASI Entertainment, TiVo and Nielsen Media Research are joining with advertisers and programmers in the USA to create the National In-Home TV Lab designed to help the television industry and advertisers understand the impact of how television viewers are going to embrace and use emerging technologies, particularly Personal Television Services. The three companies have introduced the first-of-its-kind project to create an exclusive panel of 1,500 representative homes across America, equipped with personal television services provided by TiVo. The National In-Home TV Lab is designed to forecast the future impact of personal television on television programming and advertising. In addition, it will provide an experimental platform to challenge current advertising and programme paradigms and develop new ones. Under the terms of the agreement, Nielsen Media Research will design a nationally representative sample and recruit the households (which will be separate from its television and Internet research samples), TiVo will provide its services to the selected homes, and ASI will manage the TV Lab and conduct and report the research findings. Participating media and advertising companies will be able to actively guide the direction of the TV Lab by suggesting specific areas of research, thus providing them with an advantage in developing new programming and advertising strategies. According to William Taylor, ASI's President and CEO, "Clearly, the industry will be greatly impacted by this new world of personal television. "It's imperative that we gain insight based on concrete research into consumer viewing habits in order to deliver compelling programming and advertising in this new order." Buzz Moschetto, General Manager in charge of national services for Nielsen Media Research, added, "The In-Home TV Lab presents a new and unique opportunity to evaluate viewing habits, test different scenarios, and provide our customers with valuable insights into audience behaviour. We also will be able to compare data we obtain from the TV Lab with audience behaviour from our national and local ratings samples." Commenting on the creation of the In-Home TV Lab, Jim Spaeth, President of the Advertising Research Foundation, "I believe The TV Lab touches on the precise issues that will reshape television. There has been a litany of brave, but failed attempts with new technology, but this time it seems different. Technology, economy, consumer lifestyles and workstyles, and the conditioning of the general public to the Internet all promise to make this the time it really happens."