Nielsen Starts Streaming Video Ratings Service For Platforms, Devices

by Wayne Friedman , April 22, 2021

Deepening its efforts around streaming measures, Nielsen now says it will launch Nielsen Streaming Video Ratings, a syndicated service that will provide a “macro” look at platforms and devices.

The new service measurements “should be comparable to that of the metrics already used for linear TV,” according to a media executive who spoke with Television News Daily.

Nielsen says viewership measures will survey the top 10 platforms, as well as seven categories of apps, including subscription-based, ad-supported, network, social, gaming as well as multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) and virtual MVPD apps.

Nielsen says the new service will also include advanced audience demographics per platform.

Looking at specific streaming platforms, Nielsen says Netflix now accounts for about 7% of total time for the TV.

All this will complement Nielsen’s existing weekly data top 10 streaming programs that it recently made available, where program-by-program data is expressed in total minutes viewed.

By 2023, Nielsen estimates streaming platforms will total 210 million subscribers. It says one-third of streaming homes use three to four SVOD services per month. Nearly half of homes also use an ad-supported VOD (AVOD) service.

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3 comments about "Nielsen Starts Streaming Video Ratings Service For Platforms, Devices".

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Scott Hamilton from Authentic Entertainment, April 23, 2021 at 12:47 a.m.
Very interesting to watch this develop. Which platforms are they going to measure, will those platforms agree to them measuring them, what will the metric be? comparable to linear TV metrics says panel-based, which we have seen doesn't translate well to the digital space where you have either logged in or device delivered 1-1 engagement.
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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, April 23, 2021 at 2:53 a.m.

All Nielsen has to do is record what content is played on each device which can be done in several ways, including content recognition via audio matching. In such cases it doesn't matter whether the service cooperates as is now the case with Netflix and Nielsen. The metric, will, no doubt, be average minute audience, just like TV.

John Grono from GAP Research, April 23, 2021 at 8:45 p.m.

Scott and Ed are both right.

Ed, yes you can measure (virtually) all usage in a household by using reference data bases. I say virtually because having reference data bases can change from day-to-day as sources apppear and disappear from thge market (plus for minor sources it is not economically viable).

Scott, yes in a digital world you have a 1-1 relationship. That is, if you are just looking from the publisher/host perspective and not the market perspective. Ironically, having the market perspective is the more important - if you can't get that 'right' then all subsequent data is suspect. Further, there is an assumption server side with respect to time-based metrics (the more important metric) - that end-time less start-time = engagement time. While that can hold true it is not universally true, and in my experience the norm is that is false more often than true. For example, as I am typing this comment there are 17 other MediaPost tabs open on my PC. At the server side I am seen still as a logged in and an actively engaged reader to each of those pages. The nett 'viewership' will massively overstaste the actual 'viewership.