TiVo to sell data on what people watch

The company that's made it so easy for television viewers to avoid watching ads will unveil today a plan to help stations sell them. TiVo will challenge Nielsen, whose audience ratings provide the basis for most ad sales, with Stop/Watch Local Markets. It will supplement TiVo's measurements of national TV audiences with data from all but the smallest of the nation's 210 markets. TiVo will offer stations, advertisers and program producers year-round, second-by-second information about the shows and commercials watched by people who have one of the company's DVRs. The anonymous data will come directly from the boxes. Advertisers likely will be the most interested in the data. Nielsen just measures local program viewing four months a year in all but the 21 largest communities.