Dwell Time

See also: Dwell Filtration Standard

CIMM DEFINITION: The amount of time a home or Set-Top Box spends on a channel – presumably viewing or interacting – with a piece of content such as a program, channel or network as indicated through the Set-Top Box.

2: The period of time that a user spends viewing a channel, estimated from the time between channel changes. The amount of time of a contiguous tuning event. (Source: Nielsen)

3: Dwell Time refers to the amount of time that the Set-Top Box must be tuned to a specific channel in order to report a viewing session. Set by Pay TV Operator. Once minimum Dwell Time had been reached, the viewing record is captured back to the initial second. (Source: Kantar Media Audiences)

4: Dwell Time is set by the software in the STB, and is controlled by the operator, not by Rentrak. Often for reasons of network bandwidth, operators tend to set Dwell Times at 5 or 20 seconds. From a pure data perspective, it would be best to have short Dwell Times, but operators are necessarily concerned about network loading. Fortunately, the viewing that is excluded by a 5- or even 20-second Dwell Time is negligible in terms of total hours and average audience. (Source: Rentrak)

5: TRA uses at least eleven seconds. TRA recommends zero Dwell Time Filtration. TRA data suppliers use zero in one case and at least eleven seconds in the other case and TRA algorithms make the data consistent by estimating what is going on during the filtered gaps. (Source: TRA)

6: FourthWall Media collects all events, irrespective of Dwell Time, on all advanced and legacy Set-Top Boxes. Dwell Filtration Standards may be applied after the fact to the collected data, if needed. (Source: FourthWall Media)

NOTE – What is considered acceptable Dwell Time and what constitutes Latency?

NOTE – Nielsen uses the term “Dwell Times” to describe tuning event intervals. Dwell Times are impacted by “Latency”. Kantar Media Audiences says that Dwell Times are set by the Middleware. Kantar Media Audiences’ Middleware delivers in ten second increments (for Charter) and five seconds (for Direct) but delivers second-by-second data going back to the first second if there is viewing. Gaps of ten seconds are called surfing.

NOTE – No Dwell Time filtration for TIVO, every second is measured and counted.