Trends in the Development of Television Audience Measurement Systems

The present research is devoted to the analysis of measuring the television audience systems in Russia and abroad and to identifying their development trends. The author raises several research questions: about the development of systems throughout history and the features of their transformations in the era of digitalization, about the importance of regulating these systems, as well as about their effectiveness and dynamics of development during the pressure of crisis phenomena and the growing popularity of watching TV programs in the Internet. There is the analysis of the foreign experience concerning the formation of measuring TV-audience systems in the research work in particular the example of the most advanced countries of this branch, the United Kingdom and the United States, and their comparative analysis with the native approach. The basic concepts of the media audience and the television audience as its type and various approaches to measuring the audience are also revealed in the work. The empirical part of the work examines the dynamics of recent years in the development of existing TV audience measurement systems and identifies forecasts for their development in the nearest future by analyzing statistics and reports from leading research companies, electronic and printed publications, and collecting additional information about the state and prospects of TV measurements through interviews with experts in TV measurements. The results obtained made it possible to answer all the research questions related to this study, and to make an attempt to identify the expected forecasts and prospects of research technologies for the future.