The research service is part of an effort by Thomas S. Rogers, TiVo’s chief executive, to build revenue and also to try to repair relations with marketers, which have been angry about its role in helping viewers avoid advertising.

Mr. Rogers said he hoped that TiVo’s new research would help advertisers bargain for better deals from networks. “All this money has changed hands in the TV advertising business, when there has not been any data given by the rating agencies about the watching of advertisements,” he said.

For now, TiVo will not be able to tell advertisers anything about the demographics of the audience it measures. The privacy policy of the service allows it to gather data about viewing habits, but not any personal information. Mr. Juenger said TiVo hoped to find a way to change that by the end of the year.

Nielsen has started to measure how video recorders are used, but it has been caught in a fight between the networks and advertisers about how to classify the data it gathers.

Nielsen publishes three versions of its program ratings: how many people watched a program when it was originally broadcast, how many watched it within one day and how many within a week.

In the upfront negotiations over advertising rates this spring, major ad agencies refused to use these new measures as a basis for buying commercials, arguing that most recorded advertisements are skipped. So for the next season, Nielsen will measure the number of people who actually have their set on during the commercials. (Nielsen cannot measure whether viewers leave the room, just whether the commercials are played.)

At the insistence of the networks, the company will report the average audience for all of the commercials in a program. While some advertisers want audience information broken out second by second, the networks argue that this level of detail is unreliable using the Nielsen system, which largely relies on meters that detect audio tones embedded in shows.