Sesame Street

Got to know about Sesame Street through this Google Doodle.

Sesame Street

Sesame Street is an American Children’s education TV series which has been on air for the past 40 years. This doodle is to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. It premiered on Nov 10, 1969. This post also marks its 40th anniversary 🙂

The objective behind Seasame Street revolved around the insight that “if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them”.

Sesame Street uses a combination of animation, puppets, and live actors to stimulate young children’s minds, improve their letter and word recognition, basic arithmetic, geometric forms, classification, simple problem solving, and socialization by showing children or people in their everyday lives. Since the show’s inception, other instructional goals have been basic life skills, such as how to cross the street safely, proper hygiene, healthy eating habits, and social skills; in addition, real-world situations are taught, such as death, divorce, pregnancy and birth, adoption, and even all of the human emotions such as happiness, love, anger, and hatred. Also, recently, the Sesame Street Muppets discussed the late-2000s recession with their most recent prime-time special Families Stand Together: Feeling Secure in Tough Times.

How are TRP ratings calculated?

TRP ratings…the parameter that measures the popularity of any television show and hence attracts advertisers…how is it calculated? And who does it? Was curious to know and hence this post.

According to Wiki, Television Rating Points (TRP) is the criterion that indicates the popularity of a channel or programme and this data is very useful for the advertisers. Presently, INTAM (Indian Television Audience Measurement) is the only electronic rating agency functioning in India. INTAM uses two methodologies for calculating TRP. First is frequency monitoring, in which ‘people meters’ are installed in sample homes and these electronic gadgets continuously record data about the channel watched by the family members. It reads the frequencies of channels, which are later, decoded into the name of the channels and the agency prepares a national data on the basis of its sample homes readings.

Second technique is more reliable and relatively new to India. In picture matching technique people meter continuously records a small portion of the picture that is being watched on that particular television set. Along with this agency also records all the channels’ data in the form of small picture portion. Data collected from the sample homes is later on matched with the main data bank to interpret the channel name. And this way national rating is produced.