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Most of those who proclaim “polls dictatorship” and many of those who use meter ratings have a caricatured vision of data, essentially focused on market share and the quantity of viewers. This paper aims to show it is possible to build, based on metering data, statistic patterns a bit complex, and thus to make a clever and fertile use of this tool. Based on data presented as viewers per hour, statistics measures proposed here (for instance, structure of viewing time by categories of programs (chercher “genre”), or interest measure) first enable a serious knowledge of television audience behaviour, essential to programme planners. They also enable to evaluate channels programming policies, particularly those of public ones.