(Reuters) – NBCUniversal is partnering with TV measurement agency iSpot.tv in a multi-year deal to measure its viewers in new methods, the corporate stated on Thursday, the most recent transfer amongst media firms dissatisfied with how video content material is measured.
The deal comes as Nielsen, the chief in TV measurement, faces fierce criticism from its TV business purchasers, a lot of which say it has insufficiently captured shoppers’ shift to streaming. Nielsen measures TV audiences by way of a pattern set of panelists who use particular units of their houses.
Through the partnership, Comcast Corp-owned NBCU will measure conventional linear, streaming and time-shifted viewing on a second-by-second foundation, a technique the media large believes will extra precisely seize altering viewing habits.
NBCU is launching the partnership in time to measure audiences of the Beijing Olympic Games and Super Bowl LVI, each of which shall be broadcast on NBC and streamed on its Peacock streaming service.
TV ratings are the spine of the business’s enterprise mannequin, enabling advertisers to trace viewers and serving to networks set the value for advert slots. TV promoting is predicted to complete $171 billion this 12 months, based on a forecast from advert company GroupM.
In April the commerce group representing the foremost tv networks stated Nielsen undercounted TV viewers in the course of the pandemic when the corporate’s technicians had been unable to get into panelists’ houses to repair units. That cost was later confirmed by the Media Ratings Council (MRC), which enforces measurement requirements in media, and which in September stripped Nielsen of its accreditation for each native and nationwide TV measurement.
On Aug. 23, weeks after its broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics, which drew a record-low viewers, NBCU issued a name for “measurement independence.” It issued a request for proposals to 54 firms, together with Nielsen, inviting them to take part in a brand new set of measurement instruments to assist “modernize the business’s strategy.”
(Reporting by Helen Coster in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)
