• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 7 hours ago

Co-viewing measures remain a crucial piece of the puzzle for Nielsen’s new overall effort. This will be in tandem with its official launch of the Big Data + Panel measure coming in fall.

More than other pieces, sports TV and streaming content looks to see a major benefit from co-viewing -- especially the NFL and more so with the Super Bowl, which gets an average 2.4 co-viewing persons, the best single program co-viewing result.

But the World Cup is very close behind. The recent group-stage average posted a 2.2 person co-viewing average.

The NFL has been clamoring for years for Nielsen to find a way to measure and include co-viewing in its viewership results.

Overall, preliminary data for the Big Data + Panel had resulted in around a 4% bump for a wide range of content.

A pilot co-viewing component, launched in February of this year, has provided an overall 4% bump, according to Nielsen -- boosted by high-profile sports content such as “Super Bowl LX,” the Milan Cortina Olympics, the Daytona 500, and others.

Even before the adoption of the expanded co-viewing, Fox has been paying particularly close attention to this metric during the ongoing World Cup.

The bottom line in all this is that it could boost the value of the current high viewership of the FIFA World Cup matches in terms of advertising spend on Fox and Telemundo TV/streaming platforms.

It has not been determined how much regularly inclusive co-viewing measurement will add to the $65 billion to 70 billion TV marketplace.

The NFL takes in around $4.1 billion from its national TV/streaming partners and nearly $6 billion when including all playoffs and the Super Bowl (in which that single game adds around $500 million alone).

Overall, this means the NFL has a nearly 10% share of the marketplace.

Analysts say the NFL has been hoping that all new Nielsen measures (Big Data + Panel and co-viewing) will give its partners a strong argument to raise pricing -- which has already been sharply rising.

What price rise? A sharp 10% hike, perhaps?