Nielsen on Monday unveiled a software development kit that will give it and its clients the ability to incorporate mobile viewing into TV ratings and dynamic digital ratings, and remove a troublesome blind spot that emerged as consumers continue to watch more and more video on connected devices.
Nielsen said it has been sharing those plans with clients and the TV industry for the past several months, and is prepared to weave audiences viewing TV content on digital devices into traditional TV measurement for the 2014/2015 season. To that end, Nielsen said it will offer clients this new measurement capability using a new SDK that will be ready for implementation by mid-November.
Nielsen said it mobile measurement platform will use a “unified encoding approach” for video that enables measurement to follow content across screens and ad models. For example, if a broadcaster makes a TV show available for viewing on a digital device and it meets the ad load and timeline requirements for TV ratings, then that viewing will credit to the Nielsen TV ratings, the company said.
Content that’s not eligible for TV ratings -- due to elapsed crediting time, dynamic ad insertion or because it originated from the Web itself—will be included in the Nielsen Digital Ratings.
To help it capture the greater breadth required to measure mobile viewing, Nielsen will also use a “big data and a census-style measurement approach” that links demographic information via several data providers, including Facebook, and is calibrated with Nielsen’s National People Meter panel.
Among recent activities in the mobile device arena, Nielsen and Syncbak in June announced the completion of a two-week technical trial that successfully captured and measured live TV viewing of four CBS-owned stations on mobile devices that use Syncbak’s delivery platform.
In October, Nielsen launched its Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, billing it as the first-ever measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter.
