Philadelphia - Feb 4, 2002 - Arbitron has reached the halfway point in the development of a testing pool for the final phase of U.S. market trial of the Portable People Meter by recruiting its 750th consumer in the Philadelphia TV marketplace.

The PPM is a pager-sized device that automatically detects inaudible codes that TV and radio broadcasters, as well as cable networks, embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by Arbitron. At the end of each day, participants place the meters into base stations, which recharge the devices and send the collected codes to Arbitron for tabulation.

Eight TV stations, 38 radio stations and 22 cable networks in the Philadelphia market have encoded their audio signals for the U.S. market trial. The PPM has been undergoing U.S. market trials within the Philadelphia TV market since December of 2000.