Rajar Propose Move to Electronic Measurement

Rajar, Joint Radio Audience Research Ltd, has published its roadmap for updating the way that it measures radio audiences in the UK.

The schedule includes a tendering process to begin in April 2005, with the new contract to be awarded in September 2005, or later. After that, new versions of the Arbitron Portable People Meter (PPM) and the GfK Radiocontrol systems will be vaildated and tested, alongside a new meter from Eurisko.

Sally de la Bedoyere, managing director of RAJAR, said in a statement: “The RAJAR roadmap to enhanced radio audience measurement is ambitious, but certainly achievable. It is the final stage of a journey RAJAR began in 2001 and it leads to a seismic change in radio audience measurement, namely the possible move to electronic measurement. We are optimistic that, by 2007, we will be heralding the introduction of an audio-meter based methodology, which measures analogue, digital, digital TV and Internet listening and we shall continue to work vigorously in the pursuit of this goal.”

Kelvin Mackenzie has already announced that the tests are “twaddle”, and indeed his Wireless Group is suing Rajar, as they are claiming lost revenue due to the lack of an electronic measurement system.

Rajar

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?