TiVO’s ability to “watch” the audience

Don’t look now, but Big Brother is out there. I can’t really comment on yesterday’s Super Bowl halftime show, since I was too busy to watch it. But clearly it’s created an enormous amount of “buzz” today as commentators try to figure out how to get their own ratings to rise by commenting on it. Anyway, in the middle of the buzz comes this small story from the “PR Newswire” which notes that TiVo reports that it got the biggest viewship “…according to an annual measurement of second-by-second viewership in TiVo households. The Jackson-Timberlake moment drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured. TiVo said viewership spiked up to 180 percent as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo’s unique capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again.” Apparently unremarked — which is why I’m remarking on it! — is TiVo’s ability to track “second-by-second” viewership.