Connections

AT&T has signed a multi-year deal with Nielsen calling for set-top box data from connected homes subscribed to AT&T’s DirecTV and U-verse services to be included in Nielsen’s local and national TV currency ratings services, Nielsen announced Jan. 17. That data will then be used to help Nielsen measure TV ratings.

The data included will be anonymous — information about specific users won’t be shared, Nielsen said.

“Further enhancing the Nielsen Total Audience strategy,” the data from the AT&T set-top boxes, integrated with Nielsen’s gold standard panels, will provide “high-quality measurement that leads to a greater understanding of audiences and their viewing trends,” Nielsen said in a news release.

Nielsen will combine its panel data with the anonymous TV viewing data from connected homes subscribed to the AT&T services, and Nielsen will then use the combined data for reporting on an aggregated basis, the information and data measurement company said. AT&T’s data will enhance Nielsen’s local and national TV measurement services, “providing enriched, electronic measurement in all 210 local TV markets,” Nielsen said.

Data from the DirecTV and U-verse set-top boxes will also be incorporated with data from other data providers “to complement Nielsen’s national and local suite of products,” such as Nielsen Scarborough, NLTV and Nielsen N-Score, Nielsen said.

“Combining Nielsen’s high-quality panels with anonymized set-top box data from AT&T’s DIRECTV and U-verse homes is at the center of our TV measurement strategy to enhance how TV viewing is measured,” Megan Clarken, president of Nielsen Product Leadership, said in the news release.

She added: “Nielsen is leveraging big data and its panel data to deliver comprehensive, reliable and in-depth measurement of how people consume content in today’s changing media landscape. We continue to innovate and leverage all types of data in order to enhance our local and eventually national audience measurement solutions. The inclusion of data from various providers supplements Nielsen’s panel data by providing increased granularity and more robust insights broadening our total audience view.”

The deal further reinforces the Nielsen Total Audience strategy and Nielsen’s commitment to providing media companies with the clearest-possible picture of actual TV viewership, it said.
TV networks and analysts have complained in recent years that Nielsen’s data which are used by networks to set ad rates, aren’t providing the entire picture due to the many new ways in which viewers are now consuming TV content outside of the traditional linear broadcasts. In addition to viewing content through smart TVs, TVs attached to Internet-connected set-top boxes, smartphones and tablets, viewers have increasingly been watching TV programs on-demand after the programs air live – sometimes days, weeks and even months later.

Citing Nielsen data for last month, Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said Jan. 17 that U.S. TV consumption via Internet-connected devices — including Roku, Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast — grew by about 66% year-over-year to account for 9.2% of total TV use among adults 18-49 on a total day basis in December 2016. The use among adults in that demographic was up from 5.6% in December 2015 and only 3% in December 2014, he said.

By working with providers including AT&T to provide integrated big data, Nielsen said Jan. 17 that it “continues to enhance and augment its measurement capabilities, further strengthening the currency measurement used by the industry to transact billions of advertising dollars.”