TV Ratings

TV Ratings are determined from the data collected from sample viewers.

Ratings: TRP(TV Rating point) is percentage of TV users watching a show out of total TV users at one point of time. TRP is reported as rating points/share. Share is the percentage of viewers of one show among the people viewing any channel at the same point of time.

TRP 9.0/15 for a show means 9 out of 100 TV owners are watching the show, and 15 out of 100 TV viewers at that time are watching the show. In a sample of 100 TV owners, 9 people are watching the show and 51 people are watching other shows and 49 people are not watching any show. See the ratio  9/(51+9) = 15.

GRP(Gross rating points) is averaged sum of all TRP numbers across all channels for some advertisement. Reaching 100 GRP is target of an advertising campaign.

Sample selection: Agency selects random people as part of sample based on some criteria. National readership survey document that lists user geography, access patterns and income groups is used in India. Selected people have choice to opt out and sometimes they will be given small monitory gifts for participating.

Methods to collect: Dairies, people's meters, picture collectors, SMS messages, cable and tivo software.

Methods to report: Hand tally, automated by software or mixture of techniques.

Dairies: Agency sends dairies to people log the channels and viewers on daily basis. Agency represenatatives collect dairies on weekly or monthly basis from people and manually prepare survey results.

People Meters: People's meters will be installed near the TVs at selected homes. They monitor the channel frequency and stores the information. Collection is done periodically by humans or by remote server on dailup connection. Some cable operators may change frequencies of individual channels and so it may cause discrepencies.

Picture Meter: Meters also record signals of picture for small durations so that they can be matched with channels later by humans.

Indian TV rating agencies: TAM (Television audience measurement,), also called as INTAM, a joint venture of Neilson's Media and Kanter Media provides weekly results based on some six thousand people meters. DART(Doordharshan audience ratings) is dairy based system used by Doordharshan to measure audience. Daily reports are provided by aMap(Auidence measurement and Analytics Private Limited) using daily automated collection of results from people's meters.

Foreign agencies: Neilson's Media and Arbitron in USA and BARB (British Audience Research Board) in United Kingdom are few to list.

Statistics: Number of channels in India is around 300. Indian ad market is $2B worth and advertising market in USA is $150B, and growing at the annual rate of 15%. Number of household TVs are 100 million is USA and 70 million in India.

Reference Links:
* TRP contentious rating and history.
* aMap offers real time data.
* Ratings in USA: Nielson's Media TV Ratings.
* Ratings in UK: British Audience Research Board.

Gas price per day is more expensive than car rent

I spent 30$ for rental car, but paid 34$ for refilling gas for a small trip to city. I did little search/research on Google.

Possible reasons for increase:
* Production is sligtly lesser than consumption. Production in venuzula and Iraq reduced world production by a slight margin. Consumption in Asia and Africa slightly increased.
* Weak economy and dollar got devalued.
* Speculation and arbitration compounding with war and political instabilities.

Present price decomposition:
Gas price per gallon: 4 dollors.
Crude oil: 3 dollars.
State and federal taxes: 27 cents.
Refining costs: 40 cents.
Transportation, distribution and marketing costs: 24 cents.
Station Markup: 10 cents.

Consumption: US consumes 20 million barrels of total oil per day, that is 420 million gallons of oil, and uses around 200 million gallons of that total for motor gasoline. Assuming average vehicle mileage is 20 mpg, it is used to drive 4 billion miles per day. There are around 200 million total vehicles in use. So each car drives 20 miles a day, which is reasonable. World consumes 85 million barrels per day, and china, Japan, India and Brazil consume 20 million barrels per day. These countries are growth rate per year is 8 percent and is expected to grow.

Supply: US produces around 8 million barrles per day of its need. It imports around 4 million barrels from Arab counties, around 4 million barrles from Canada and approximately 4 million barrels from Mexico. Arab countries produces around 9 million barrles per day and all countries together produce around 82 million barrles per day. Supply is lesser than the demand, but oil reserves compensate it. There is no shortage of oil for half decade or so, and infact countries started investing in producing more oil.

Refinaries: Important factors adding to cost are operating cost, distance to refinaries, fedaral and state laws for minimal quality of oil and cleaner burning standards add to cost.

References:
* How gas prices work.
* The future of oil.
* vechicle statistics in US.
* Oil supply and consumption
* Oil production statistics
* Oil reserves in world
* Fundamentals of gas price increase.