Nielsen

The football season hasn’t officially started yet, and Amazon.com is already on the verge of scoring a touchdown. Nielsen is planning to incorporate viewing data from streaming services for live programming, a move that will likely boost the ratings for Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football package and allow it to charge more for commercials. This is the first time Nielsen has agreed to use a company’s own data along with its independent research to publicly report ratings. It only applies for live programming on streaming services and is open to other streamers as well.

Summer TV broadcast viewing patterns continue to follow that of recent live, linear television trends overall — registering double-digit percentage declines in viewing, with national TV spend also sinking. After nearly two months, season-to-date viewership dropped 25% to average 1.81 million viewers per summer prime-time episode, according to Nielsen’s live program-plus-seven days of time-shifted video-on-demand metric for May 25-Aug. 13.

Comcast said it signed a multi-year data license renewal with Nielsen that will expand the ratings firm’s access to return-path data about TV usage from millions of cable subscribers’ homes. Nielsen will increase its use of Comcast data in its Nielsen One measurement system and broaden its use for local-TV measurement in the 94 markets the two companies share.

Streaming grabbed a record 37.7% share of television usage in June as Paramount’s Paramount Plus reached the 1% share mark for the first time, Nielsen said. Total TV usage registered its first month-over-month increase since January, driven by an increase among youngsters in the 2-to-17 age group. According to Nielsen, streaming and game console usage generated 90% of young people’s increased TV usage in June. Broadcast fell to its lowest share on record at 20.8%. Broadcast usage was down 6.6%, dropping its share by 2 points from last month. Pictured: S.W.A.T. was the most watched streaming show in June.

In a deal with cloud-based data-management platform Snowflake, Nielsen today rolled out what it describes as a “media data room” (MDR) enabling clients to access a “census of first-party data” that can be matched to Nielsen’s media audience attributes. “It is a step towards building a true clean room, which will allow data to flow both into and out of the Nielsen ecosystem,” a Nielsen spokesman said.

The company says the quarterly report provides streaming metrics at the local market level for the first time.

Kimberly Gilberti, a key executive in the launch of Nielsen’s Nielsen One measurement system, has joined Experian Marketing Services as chief product officer. Gilberti joins Experian as it is enhancing its product offerings by using technology from Tapad, which was acquired by Experian in 2020. Gilberti spent 23 years at Nielsen, which lost a number of senior executives at the end of last year.

Spanish-TV giant TelevisaUnivsion wants to speak a different language than its English-speaking rivals when it comes to audience measurement. “We all know that today’s TV measurement is inadequate for our multi-screen world, and as a consequence, U.S Hispanics have been undercounted,” says Donna Speciale, president of U.S. ad sales and marketing at the company. “In fact, our audience is 26% bigger than current measurement. How did we get that information? Nielsen just told us,” she says, using its traditional panel-based tabulation as well as its “big data” product. “This is huge and and a huge step for equity,” she adds, noting that TelevisaUnivision will ask all agencies and clients to base this year’s upfront ad deals on that measurement.

Buyers and sellers are still playing with alternative currencies such as VideoAmp, iSpot are Comscore, but nothing will take the place of C3/C7 ratings in a majority of this year’s upfront sales. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Nielsen said the Alpha version of its Nielsen One system designed to measure the consumption of content is now being used by clients including The Walt Disney Co., Mediahub, Sony Pictures Television, TelevisaUnivision, AMC Networks and Horizon Media. The Alpha version focuses on program-level measurement across platforms. It will be more broadly released in late 2024, Nielsen said.

The 2023 contest becomes the most-watched after previously ranking third. The viewership total was revised from 113 million to 115.1 million across Fox, Fox Deportes and streaming after it was discovered Nielsen had miscounted the audience due to encoding errors.

Hours after Nielsen issued a notice to clients Thursday reaffirming its support of Media Rating Council (MRC), it received its own endorsement from a strange bedfellow: Rival audience measurement service Comscore. “Comscore joins with Nielsen in support of MRC accreditation and their call for greater trust and transparency in the selling process and for currency that is informed by big data.” Comscore’s statement was issued just before OpenAP’s and the VAB’s “joint industry committee (JIC) began its upfront-style pitch on its ad currency certification plans to the ad industry in New York City Thursday afternoon.

On the eve of television’s upfront advertising market, Nielsen released a statement to clients urging them to use its legacy panels-only measurement system as currency, but said it will make its big-data plus panels measurement available for clients who want to use that to transact.

The U.S. Joint Industry Committee is preparing to answer the company’s concerns.

After being suspended for 19 months, the Media Rating Council has reinstated the ratings service.

The multi-year deal includes local TV stations, national networks and a regional cable channel.

The new capability includes feeds that have unique, streamed content that is not available on the station’s over-the-air channels or direct-to-cable station feeds.

In February — typically a slower-moving month for TV consumption — total time watching TV for persons two years of age and up declined 5.1% compared to January, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge measure. Still, while other major categories fell, streaming platforms continued to pace upwards — adding 1.5 percentage points from January to a leading 34.3% share of time spent viewing — another record for the digital video format.

Despite dubious transparency and questionable methodologies, Nielsen remains a preeminent presence in measuring domestic TV audiences. And it’s monthly “Gauge” market share tracker, introduced in 2021, has continued to draw attention. On Wednesday, Nielsen released its latest graphic, highlighting U.S. TV usage for January. “Streaming” occupied 38.1% of the overall viewing pie. That’s up nearly 10% from the 28.9% it registered in Nielsen’s comparable “Gauge” from January 2022.

While broadcast viewing got its usual boost in January from heavy NFL sports viewing, on a year-over-year basis it was down 6% from January 2022, according to Nielsen’s Gauge, which measures total day viewing by persons two years of age and up. Broadcast content rose 2.1% in January from December, which gave it a 24.9% share.

The newly formed Joint Industry Committee aims to set measurement, currency standards by an aggressive March 1 deadline. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Netflix has expanded its measurement deal with Nielsen. Under the terms of the deal, Netflix will now subscribe to Nielsen’s national TV content measurement and streaming TV data services.

The measurement companies looking to offer alternatives to Nielsen were mostly supportive of the move announced Monday by major programmers to create a Joint Industry Committee that will standardize and design multiple currencies for buying and selling advertising.

Xandr head of research Pete Doe joins Nielsen, research chief Mainak Mazumdar exits.

The National Football League said it worked with Nielsen on a special study looking at viewing of its games on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) in group settings and found its games reach an average of more than 20 million additional viewers. According to the study, the games had an average-minute audience of 44.1 million viewers, up 31% from the 33.6 million Nielsen initially reported.

NBCUniversal says its advertisers had hundreds of millions of reasons to be thankful over the Thanksgiving weekend — one of the business shopping periods of the year. Across its portfolio NBCU’s programming — as measured by Nielsen — reached 121 million people aged 2 and up. Data from measurement company iSpot.tv shows the ads on NBCU properties reached 128 million adults.

Never mind those weekly Nielsen program rankings showing that Netflix still dominates engagement, Prime has more subs, research company says.

Peter Bradbury had been with the measurement company for 26 years. (Image: Nielsen)

Nielsen’s monthly snapshot of TV use shows streaming platforms commanding 37.3% of viewing time in the United States, up from 36.9% in September. Streaming has grown for eight straight months, according to Nielsen, and has led all platforms for four months in a row. Broadcast viewing rose by 10 percent over September and added 1.8 share points thanks to big growth among dramas and sports.

The Media Rating Council decided that it is not ready to re-accredit Nielsen’s television ratings service just as the measurement company is getting ready to launch its new Nielsen One system. The decision led Nielsen critics to renew their objections to Nielsen going forward with Nielsen One. Despite industry criticism and increased activity with alternative measurement providers, Nielsen remains the predominant currency for buying and selling billions of dollars worth of advertising.

The start of the World Series and the annual “Treehouse of Horror” episode of The Simpsons gave Fox a bigger presence than usual in Nielsen’s seven-day ratings. CBS’s NCIS, meanwhile, became the first entertainment show of the 2022-23 season to break the 10 million-viewer mark with a week of delayed viewing.

By Nielsen’s count, 7.8 million people watched Amazon Prime’s coverage of last Thursday’s NFL game between New Orleans and Arizona. But Amazon says no, there were actually 8.9 million people watching. So which is it? You’ll have to judge for yourself. After each of its Thursday night games this season, Amazon has publicly contracted Nielsen in this manner. Neither company is saying the other is wrong, but neither is backing down, either. The result is confusion, most notably for advertisers.

The agreement provides a suite of Nielsen and Gracenote solutions to power engagement of U.S. Hispanics across Spanish-language media.

Nielsen has told the FCC it is working on a product to analyze “behind the camera” as well as on-screen diversity that could give the agency most of the information it may be looking for without making programmers and distributors, including streamers owned by media companies with FCC licenses, have to certify that information.

Nielsen Holdings said that it completed its sale to a group of private equity investors led by Elliott Investment Management and Brookfield Business Partners. The deal is valued at $16 billion, including the assumption of debt. The change of control happens at a time when media companies and media buyers are more actively exploring alternatives to Nielsen as currency for buying and selling advertising.

The media-measurement giant has entered into a pact with streaming portal Roku that calls for Nielsen to track viewership across traditional and connected TV watching, desktop usage and mobile screens. Advertisers who use Roku can get data on the reach of their commercials among Roku users that will rely on so-called “deduplicated” audiences, or people who aren’t seeing the same content on different viewing platforms.