That’s been a long time coming for networks,
which have been prodding Nielsen to find a
way to pick up this extra viewership for years.
CNBC stopped subscribing to Nielsen four
years ago, feeling cheated because Nielsen
didn’t count people who watched business
coverage in offices.
“We think it’s important,” said Scott Brown,
a Nielsen executive. “We know that this is
real viewership that wasn’t being counted or
measured and our goal is to measure everyone
that is watching.”
Based on its tests, Nielsen predicts that its
count of people watching sports events will go
up an average of 11 percent. News shows are
averaging a 7 percent increase. For networks
that traffic in that programming, that’s real
money — numbers that can be incorporated in
what they charge for commercial time.
For example, Nielsen reported in February that
100.7 million people watched the Super Bowl.
But with out-of-home viewership is counted,
that added 12 million people.
Nielsen has spent years tinkering with the
technology to achieve this, where viewership is
counted through a portable device that picks
up embedded audio signals. Typically, in-home
viewership is counted through a device attached
to television sets.
As the system has been tested for the past
two years, Nielsen has been selling the out-of-
home measurements to specific clients as an
extra service.
Football is back in the picture now, and in last
week’s ratings NBC was the biggest beneficiary.