Nielsen, which has an agreement with Roku to measure video advertising on Roku TV devices and streaming players, said measurement data shows 27% of content viewed via Roku is viewed by two or more viewers at that sitting. Nielsen says that indicates advertisements could attain 30% more viewer impressions. Some genres had higher co-viewing rates than that: children's content was co-viewed 38% of the time and sports was co-viewed 28% of the time, Nielsen said.
The Nielsen item, published as a blog post with a chart, did not differentiate between streamed content, via services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, that don't carry ads and content viewed on those platforms that does contain ads. In fact all kinds of content were measured, not just shows with ads. A Nielsen representative said the study used actual metered viewing data stemming from TV sets connected to Roku boxes in Nielsen's National People Meter (NPM) sample. It involved a month (May 2015) of data and included some 607,000 viewing instances.
