TV Ratings Collide with Streaming: What Happens Next

A recent decision by a lesser-known industry group might just shake things up in the TV ratings and ad game. The Media Rating Council, which gives the thumbs up to audience measurement models from big names like Nielsen and Comscore, has approved Nielsen’s plan to mix in streaming data from first-party sources with its national TV ratings panel. This new approach, dubbed the “panel plus big data” measurement, could potentially reveal a higher count of viewers for live events compared to the panel-only measure.

Now, before you get too excited, it’s worth noting that the sample size for this new measurement is pretty tiny at the moment. As of now, Amazon is the only Nielsen client using this method, and it’s only for Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football games.

But the early data from Amazon looks promising. According to Nielsen, their panel-only figures had Thursday Night Football at 13.2 million viewers per game this season. When they added in the big data from Amazon’s streaming, that number shot up to 14.26 million viewers—a difference of over a million viewers, which is about an 8 percent increase.

This trend seems to align with the limited multiplatform data from other sources that sometimes combine TV and streaming numbers for live events. For example, NBC’s Sunday Night Football has been pulling in an average of about 18.9 million TV viewers this season. When you factor in streaming on Peacock and other digital platforms, the total audience size could be even bigger. The potential of merging TV ratings with streaming data is definitely something to keep an eye on as we move forward in the ever-evolving world of entertainment.