The Portable People Meter (Sure Looks Strange to Me)

According to a story in this Sunday's New York Times magazine, Nielsen's competitor, Arbitron, will soon be testing a brand new audience measurement device called the Portable People Meter. It's a plastic box the size of a pager that volunteers will wear throughout their waking hours and that will eventually record virtually all their media consumption. Jon Gertner, who wrote the Times story, says the small box is putting big smiles on the faces of advertisers who, of course, largely determine what gets produced on television in the first place. Traditional Nielsen data, says Gertner, has simply not kept up with the ever-expanding TV universe.
...JON GERTNER: The engineers at Arbitron began with a couple of military contractors and some other academic advisors to look at this idea called psychoacoustic masking. Psychoacoustic masking places an electronic digital code just beneath the frequency of the sound we hear. The engineers at Arbitron hope that, by getting every channel, whether it be television or radio, in the country, to code their broadcasts with this kind of digital repeating code, their portable people meter could then pick up the code. The CEO of Arbitron believes that eventually all media with sound will be encoded. That includes DVDs, video games, supermarket muzak, anything you can think of, really.