When TV Ratings Finally Collide With Streaming

A recent decision by a little-known industry oversight group could end up having a sizable impact on TV ratings and the ad business that relies on them.

The Media Rating Council, which accredits audience measurement models from such companies as Nielsen, Comscore and VideoAmp, gave a thumbs-up to Nielsen’s plan to incorporate first-party data from streaming outlets into its national TV ratings panel. The “panel plus big data” measurement has the potential — at least for live events — to show that a noticeably higher number of people are watching a given program than the panel-only measure.

The sample size for panel plus big data measurement, it needs to be noted, is exceedingly small at the moment: The only Nielsen client using the new measurement so far is Amazon, and then only for Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football telecasts.

Still, what data there is shows a good-sized boost with the addition of Amazon’s streaming data. Nielsen’s panel-only figures have Thursday Night Football at 13.2 million viewers per game this season; the big data addition pushes the audience up to 14.26 million, a gain of more than a million viewers (about 8 percent). 

That increase tracks with (again, limited) multiplatform data from other outlets that occasionally report combined TV and streaming numbers for live events. NBC’s Sunday Night Football is averaging about 18.9 million TV viewers this season; with streaming on Peacock and other digital platforms (as measured by Adobe Analytics), those games rise to 21.3 million, a gain of about 13 percent.

Fox, ESPN and CBS also have noted streaming boosts for live sports, although not as regularly (CBS also is in a contract dispute with Nielsen at the moment and not using the latter’s ratings product).

Nielsen is in talks with some other clients to use the panel plus big data measurement for live events. What it won’t do, however, is show supplemental same-day viewing for most regular programming — an episode of, say, Chicago Fire doesn’t stream on Peacock concurrently with its NBC broadcast the way that Sunday Night Football does.

But with live telecasts among the most reliable audience draws on TV (and, in the case of Thursday Night Football, streaming), the new tool could help networks and streamers make the case to advertisers that an even bigger audience is out there.