Know what we've always considered the dumbest concept when it comes to TV audience monitoring? That nobody has figured out how to use that big clunky box attached to hundreds of millions of television sets and get it to spit out viewership data. It's like, "Hi, I'm a cable box, and I know exactly when the fat ass sitting on the Jennifer Convertibles softa in front of me changes the channel, and I bet somebody might find that data useful."

Instead, we rely on Nielsen's sampling techniques, which narrow things down to, say, give or take a hundred thousand viewers. Oh, and then there's the little problem of Nielsen's totally flawed methodology, which, among other atrocities, includes ignoring the whole swath of young people getting their bachelor's degrees.

So imagine our glee when we heard TNS Media Research is taking on Nielsen with actual data from set-top boxes. What's this? Accuracy?

With a service called TNS DirecTView, the new competition will analyze data from 100,000 DirecTV customers, with second-by-second data grabs. By comparison, Nielsen relies on just 14,000 households, many of whom are still responsible for completing paper diaries about their TV viewing habits. Sounds full-proof!

The one downside for TNS, at least right now, is that its data comes just from satellite TV subscribes, which is a smaller number than cable subscribers, and may, in theory, represent a "subset" of American viewers. That is, many DirecTV subscribers may have signed up for the service because of their beefy sports packages. Thus, data will skew toward lots of NBA games watched, throwing off the percentage of "normal America" that was watching Desperate Housewives. (Critics will also argue TNS can't measure when someone gets up to grab another Amstel Light, and misses a Head On ad.)

TNS joins TiVo in offering advertisers and agencies more robust on-demand data. The DVR company, looking for new revenue streams, also realized its device could be a data mining boon, and has started collecting its users' channel changes.

Of course, privacy concerns might get in the way: Will all customers be keen on forfeiting their viewing habits? We hope so, if only because this more accurate data might reveal Friday Night Lights has more viewers than previously thought. And The View has far fewer.