MUMBAI: Television recording technology company TiVo has signed a deal with TV ratings agency Nielsen Media Research which will develop a service that tracks digital video recorder users' habits.

TiVo says Nielsen will pay a licensing fee to it, although no finacial agreements have been made public. The two companies will provide information on DVR use and viewing patterns to clients in the television and advertising industry using a sample of TiVo's more than one million subscribers, say reports.

TiVo technology enables digital video recorders which are set-top boxes with built-in hard disk drives that allow users to save more than 40 hours of TV programming for later use. TiVo also enables users to pause live TV and immediately replay a selected scene.

TiVo president Marty Yudkovitz says its system, which can track second-by-second activity of TV viewers, can give industry clients more detail about the shows and advertisements that are watched and at what point viewers turn away from a show or ad.

The DVR data will also be able to measure the activity of users who record a show at the same time they are watching another.

The deal is likely to benefit Nielsen, the major player in TV viewing data services to counter recent criticism about its method of measuring ratings, which has shown a significant decline in young male viewers, a segmetn coveted by marketers.