The Nielsen system, which measures television viewership, is far from responsive to the technology that’s created the modern viewing era, whether it’s the rise of DVR-assisted watching (still only 17 percent of television viewing) or streaming on platforms from Hulu to HBO GO. And it’s helped perpetuate a perception that watching shows in the time slot is the most valuable kind of viewership, even if time-shifting and streaming let viewers watch shows when they can be most engaged in absorbed in them. So it’s good to see, as the New York Times reports, advertisers and networks trying to do research that dispels that perception and develops new ways of rating and monetizing programming. Among the initial results:

Both pilot tests had a similar major finding: that the growing viewership of video online and on mobile devices is not diminishing the appetite for watching television. “Consumers have a desire to build more content into their lives,” said Joan FitzGerald, vice president for television sales and business development at comScore in Reston, Va.

For instance, consumers who watch online video “were greater users of TV” than those who did not, she added. The fact that the pilot test showed “there is not a lot of cannibalization” is significant, Ms. FitzGerald said. Likewise, Carol Edwards, senior vice president for cross-platform sales and marketing at Arbitron in Columbia, Md., said: “There isn’t cannibalization. Other platforms are complementary to television.”

“TV continues to play such a dominant role,” she added, “though there is content available on other platforms.” The tests are important, Ms. Edwards said, because “all the media companies are trying to monetize their content platforms and to be fully monetized, they need to be measured.” Among the findings of the Arbitron test that may be surprising was that of all the people who viewed content on all three screens, the largest demographic group was not the youngest. Adults ages 35 to 49 led, at 36.6 percent, followed by adults ages 50 and older, at 34.8 percent, and then by adults ages 18 to 34, at 28.6 percent

This kind of finding is critically important, and I look forward to the kinds of innovations these kinds of technologies eventually enable. I’d love to know if it’s possible, when someone DVRs a show, for the recording to be retrieved from a cloud rather on the recorder so the ads embedded in it could be continually updated, and made freshly relevant whenever someone chooses to play it. Similarly, I’d be curious to know if Hulu’s able to get higher ad rates on impressions its algorithm suggests are more directly relevant to users. Either way, anything that makes it easier to monetize shows in accordance with how they’re actually watched in terms of both time and intensity, and that makes it easier to support lower-rated shows on networks is good news for smart television.

I was on the train and cut off from internet access yesterday, social media blew up over a site that let people enter in how much they’d pay per month for stand-alone HBO GO. It was a recapitulation of a debate we’ve had here before, about however much people would like to have standalone HBO GO, it’s a move that would fundamentally blow up HBO’s business model, and that HBO can’t approach quickly or lightly given its current commitments to cable companies and the scope of the programing it’s invested in. But the experiment also demonstrated one of the core difficulties in this debate: the fact that the people who talk most about wanting options that would allow them to watch television differently are a vocal minority whose behavior differs from much of the rest of the country in ways they don’t always seem to recognize or acknowledge.

One of the things this experiment exposed is that subscribers aren’t willing to pay enough for stand-alone HBO GO to support HBO’s current programming investments. As Sarah Pavis pointed out at BuzzFeed, people who submitted their quotes to the site ended up producing an average price of $12, lower than many current HBO subscriptions. We’ve discussed this before, but the current HBO price is feasible both because it’s essentially a volume discount, and because the cable companies cover their administrative and customer service costs. What this experiment tells HBO is not that there’s a lot of money for grabs out there, but that if it blows up its business models and its relationships with the cable companies who could cut them off if they offered a stand-alone option, their replacement customers would want to pay less for service than the current ones do. It’s true that HBO wouldn’t be splitting those fees with distributors, but it would have to take on a whole new range of expenses, including administration and some promotion, in the absence of cable support.

And it’s not just that folks are mistaking their preferences for a profitable business model. Josef Adalian at Vulture highlighted this piece from the Economist from last summer, in which HBO estimated that while there are 77 million households that have committed to buying cable but aren’t subscribed to HBO, there are only 3 million households that have broadband but not cable, and that fall into HBO’s target income bracket. Far more subscribers are invested in cable’s basic model, but are yet to be convinced by HBO’s specific product than there are consumers who only want HBO on the condition that HBO move away from the model that’s allowed it to make gorgeous, intellectually rich programming.

In Business Insider today, an industry analyst points out another emerging trend that may have been analyzed out of proportion to its actual adoption: time-shifted viewing of television. 83 percent of television viewing, according to the piece, still happens in the time slot in which an episode airs.

Taken together, these two sets of information are a salient reminder that as frustrated as some people are with the current model of television distribution, and as much as some vocal subset of people are changing their habits, television as it stands is a model that an awful lot of people are happy with. That doesn’t mean that they’ll remain happy with it, or that their viewing and consumption habits won’t change. But it does suggest we may still be a ways out from the point where it makes sense for a network like HBO to blow up the existing model, suffer through several rough years with a clear light visible at the end of the tunnel.

The big news out of this New York Times story about changes in measuring the ratings is that Modern Family has finally dethroned American Idol to become truly the most-watched show on American television. But to my mind, the most fascinating tidbit, particularly given the conversation that’s been going on about is this one:

Those competition shows also tend to be recorded and viewed later much less frequently, so the DVR has been a special enhancement to scripted shows. Among the prime-time hits that get a 40 percent or higher lift among 18- to 49-year-olds because of time-shifting: Fox’s “House,” “Glee,” “New Girl,” and “Alcatraz”; ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and “Revenge”; and NBC’s “The Office” and “Up All Night.” “It used to be that you figured even the most ardent fans of a show saw only two of every four episodes,” Mr. Levitan said. “I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think with DVR and other ways people can catch up more and more, people actually see the entire season of a show.”

I’d be curious to know if that’s actually true—I’ve been looking through a bunch of studies of viewership and haven’t been able to find relevant survey questions to that effect, and if you have them, I would be delighted to see them. But Nielsen has found that younger viewers (and by that, I mean viewers 6-11) in particular tend to rewatch shows that they’ve DVRed multiple times. Now, if people are actually making more of an effort to catch every episode of their favorite shows, where previously they dipped in and out, and if we’re raising a generation of kids who watch episodes over and over again, that could be a response to shows that have become more progressively serialized over time. But if those shifts are driven by technology and the culture that’s grown up around television viewing, then it would make a lot of sense that creators are responding to that trend with a move towards serialized narratives that are seeded with conversational details and easter eggs and comedies that are packed with mile-a-minute-jokes. If your viewers, or at least a chunk of them, are going to look at you in a very different way, it makes sense that you would respond to those signals and imperatives.