Nielsen to Release Monthly Snapshot of Total TV Time

Nielsen’s ongoing quest to measure the fast-changing television landscape will now include a monthly snapshot into how consumers around the country are spending their TV screen time. A new monthly graphic, which Nielsen is calling The Gauge, will offer a window into total TV time, including both broadcast and cable television time along with streaming video usage. The data snapshot combines two of Nielsen’s existing data sets: the company’s long-running national television panel and its newly introduced streaming video ratings service, which the firm took the wraps off in April. “It’s really a deceivingly simple picture that has a tremendously broad view of how consumers are spending their time with television,” Brian Fuhrer, Nielsen’s svp, product strategy, said in a video explainer. “This puts everything together.” In its inaugural release Thursday, Nielsen’s Gauge found that streaming usage across all television homes has climbed to 26% of all time spent on TV, and that streaming and broadcast, combined evenly, accounts for half of all television time. Cable still accounts for the lion’s share of television time, at 39%. Within streaming time spent, Netflix and YouTube lead, at 6% each of total television time spent. Consumers spent 3% of total television time streaming on Hulu’s on-demand and live services, 2% streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and 1% streaming on Disney+. Going forward, Nielsen will release additional data snapshots in the middle of every month. Nielsen's evolving metrics The release of the Gauge comes as Nielsen has looked to rework and update many of its metrics to account for the changing consumer realities that often favor streaming. In April, Adweek exclusively reported on the company’s roll-out of Nielsen Streaming Video Ratings, which measures total viewing and audience demographic information across 10 subscription video-on-demand, ad-supported video-on-demand, MVPD and virtual MVPD services. That ratings system, which measures internet traffic instead of using network codes and audio fingerprints, tracks who is watching, when viewers are watching, what app they are watching on and through what platform they are accessing that programming, along with demographic information for streaming audiences. But Nielsen had previously siloed its linear metrics and its streaming metrics. Nielsen’s weekly SVOD Content Ratings, for example, only measures the most popular shows on streaming, while its linear panel only pits live linear programs against one another. In an interview with The New York Times, Nielsen CEO David Kenny, who took the reins of Nielsen in late 2018, said it was time to pull the two together to offer a complete picture. “To the consumer, she’s got her remote control, and she’s moving from live sports over to news down to streaming and back around," Kenny said. "We need to bring the whole industry together to a comparable way of looking at this." Nielsen has been plugging away at additional measurement updates as well as it looks to build toward a single cross-platform measurement, Nielsen One, which would allow publishers and marketers to transact on a single metric across linear and digital platforms. That cross-media measurement tool, though, will not be ready until 2022. “This is an important step towards Nielsen One,” Fuhrer said. “This is really the first tangible example of putting streaming and television together in one picture.” A chance to bounce back The release of The Gauge also comes at a critical time for a company that has been on the defense for the past several months. Earlier this year, Nielsen, after facing bruising industry pressure, acknowledged that some of its metrics may have been inaccurate during the Covid-19 pandemic due to its pause on in-home maintenance visits that help to ensure the validity of the firm’s measurement panel. Various networks, led by the Video Advertising Bureau industry group, have slammed Nielsen for the inaccuracies and have called for better and more accurate measurement going forward, including signaling an appetite for competitors in the space. Nielsen, for its part, has committed to rectifying many of the concerns by resuming in-home maintenance visits and has rushed to bring its panel size back up to pre-pandemic levels. As it feels the heat from its existing customer base, the new metric could warm Nielsen up to new customers—namely, streaming services like Netflix, which don't run advertising but nonetheless are interested in how consumers are using their products compared to other entertainment options. “[Nielsen] used to not be very sophisticated or accurate in terms of internet viewing, but over the last two years, they’ve developed and rolled out new technology at the Wi-Fi router level," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings—whose company has previously discounted Nielsen's measurement of Netflix viewing—told The New York Times. "And so, for the homes in the Nielsen panel, they now have an accurate view of internet viewing, including Netflix and YouTube. They’re thoughtful people, they’ve been doing this for a long time—I assume it’s pretty good. They have incentive to be accurate.” Nielsen Will Start Measuring Streaming More Like Linear TV