It's been announced that Arthur Charles Nielsen, Jr. of the eponymous ratings firm, has died at the age of 92. He had been suffering from Parkinson's disease.

After serving in the Army Corps. of Engineers during World War II, Nielsen joined his father's research firm, A.C. Nielsen, in 1945. He stayed with the firm for the rest of his adult life, becoming President in 1957 and Chairman in 1975.

Nielsen ratings are now synonymous with TV ratings, thanks largely to his use of cutting-edge technology -- he had the first general-purpose computer, the Univac, built back in 1948 -- which revolutionized the nascent business of market research.

Jon Stewart whipped out the glasses and the chalkboard, embraced the weird camera angles, and spent the first 20 minutes of 'The Daily Show' (Weeknights, 11PM ET on Comedy Central) reporting on Glenn Beck's departure from Fox News as if he was Glenn Beck.

Although the spoof was often longer in ambition than execution, Stewart did an excellent job of parodying Beckian logic in a nifty riff on the Nielsen ratings.

"People will tell you Glenn was fired because of plummeting ratings: 30 percent of his viewers have abandoned him, his audience's medium age is now dead of natural causes," Stewart-as-Beck-commenting-on-Beck hysterically explained.

There's good news for a television industry that's supposedly been dying since the 1950s. Despite the fact we can view videos on our desktops, laptops, iPads, iPhones, smart phones, and above the urinal at the airport, most TV watching is still done at home. And, it's running at an all-time high.

According to recent tracking by the Nielsen rating service, the amount of television watching per viewer has increased from 4.86 hours per day in 2007 to 5.13 hours. Per household, the total amount of time viewers stare at the flat-screen is a whopping eight hours.

When the going gets tough, the tough veg out in front of the tube.

Variety's picks for the top new series of the 2009-10 season suggest that, in these tough times, viewers' favorite new shows were generally the light, escapist, family-friendly ones. Most were comedies (including 'Community,' 'Glee,' and 'Modern Family'), but even the dramas were low-key affairs ('Parenthood,' the strangely reassuring 'Good Wife,' the fantasy 'Vampire Diaries').

Of the four new dramas on the list, only one was a crime procedural ('NCIS: Los Angeles'). Even the one reality show on the list was one that didn't involve competition and elimination ('Undercover Boss').

The premiere episode of FX's 'Justified' was a lot of fun to watch and apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought so.

Tuesday's episode, titled "Fire in the Hole" after the Elmore Leonard novella upon which the series is based, scored 4.2 million sets of eyeballs, the network's second highest rating since the premiere of 'The Shield.'

Naturally, the show scored more older than younger viewers, but my gut tells me that could change once word spreads about the type of show it is and the quality it can produce. Sure it's a pseudo-western, but it has a very updated and edgy feel. It's fun for the whole family, if your family is one of those weird groups that lets their kids watch anything whether it's an edgy Western drama or late night Cinemax.

PBS is getting in on the ratings game.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the network has announced that it will be signing up with Nielsen Ratings, providing a weekly -- but not daily -- outlook on its programs. This will be a first for the network, which launched back in 1970.

We're talking ratings here, not quality of the shows. Nielsen has the top ten rated shows for 2009 and also has a couple of other categories, including the top ten single telecasts and the top ten time-shifted shows of the year (you might not guess that).

Speaking of not guessing what something is, you're never going to believe what the number ten show is on the top ten rated shows of the year list. The Live Feed was surprised and I'm not sure I'm convinced either. The full list of the ten highest-rated shows is after the jump.

Don't blame Jay Leno. NBC's risky experiment, gutting its 10PM drama slate to air Leno's low-budget variety hour five nights a week, may not have paid off in ratings, and the move may have made NBC an easy target for scorn and ridicule. But Nielsen ratings numbers suggest that no one could have slowed the slide during the final hour of primetime.

According to the Associated Press, the 10PM hour has become the time when viewers catch up with the shows on their DVR queues. So viewership of first-run shows at 10PM is down at all of the big three broadcast networks.

People who hoped and prayed that The Jay Leno Show would become a big failure had one less reason to go on living this week.

It seems that the show has hit stopped a recent "ratings slide." The last 11 episodes either maintained or improved their adult demographic ratings after a long slide since September.

Even the holidays didn't dampen the show's ratings. The show before Thanksgiving was his most watched since October and was the only show in his timeslot that didn't see a decline in the ratings.

Does this mean Leno will pull himself out of the muck or just sink deeper into the bottomless swamp that is NBC?

If you're watching television right now, congratulations. You are part of a new world record.

The Nielsen Company announced that TV viewing for the 2008-09 season reached a new high in average watching time. Now the average American spends four hours and 49 minutes every day in front of the idiot box and the average household spends more than eight hours a day watching television. ("God bless America, land where we loaf, staring down from, our favorite futon, all day and night at the light of HBO")

However, this doesn't mean everyone to celebrating. In fact, the big four networks (five if you count the CW) actually saw a decline in viewers because we have so many other choices now between cable and the Internet. Do you any of you actually watch that much television?

According to a new Nielsen study, Americans are wasting over 19 hours a day doing something other than watching television.

Admittedly we here at AOL TV are little biased towards the television side of things, but all joking aside, the latest figures from Nielsen are a bit of a surprise considering the amount of time people are now also spending online and pursuing alternate forms of entertainment such as video games.

Let's face it, the Top Ten list on The Late Show with David Letterman can be hit or miss some nights (and just miss other nights). But they can still make lists where every entry is pretty damn funny. That happened last night, as Letterman presented the "Top Ten Signs Your Toddler Watches Too Much Television." Hey, it's TV-related so it's a perfect list for us.

[Watch episodes and clips of The Late Show and other shows at SlashControl.]

You're probably going to say that Dancing with the Stars was one of them, but actually those episodes were numbers 9 and 10. And it wasn't one of the CSI shows or one of the comedies on CBS and it wasn't Grey's Anatomy.

Hint: the two shows are related, and I think they're taking over the television landscape. Here's the full list of the top 20 shows in the Nielsen ratings last week. Three new shows made the list.

Everyone is always up in arms about the Nielsen ratings, saying they don't accurately represent the shows that a lot of people like or aren't measured correctly or simply don't matter in this age of DVRs, iTunes, network web sites, and DVDs.

Now it looks like the networks are giving a thought to providing an alternative. CBS, NBC, Disney, News Corp, Discovery, Time Warner, and Viacom are getting together and hope to have some sort of plan on what the "consortium" will do by the end of September. A VP at Starcom MediaVest, one of the companies involved, says that they don't necessarily want to replace Nielsen but there's no reason why another company can't "come in and do both [TV measurement and digital measurement]"

[via TV Tattle]

If Jay Leno isn't the answer for NBC prime time, perhaps the network should think about booking President Obama. NBC News devoted two hours, on Tuesday and Wednesday night, for Inside the Obama White House and the ratings were strong. Better than the insipid I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here, which acted as a lead-in. Of course the season finale of Law & Order: SVU on Tuesday didn't hurt the news production.

Having watched the two hours, NBC should sign the president ASAP. There's always the curiosity factor when a viewer is being given access behind the scenes, and that's what Inside the Obama White House did. It was a look at the real West Wing, which reminded me a lot of the fictional, Aaron Sorkin West Wing creation, and that was quite cool. President Obama still fascinates me, and it's well past 100 days.