Nielsen Will Start Tracking Netflix and Amazon Video

An anonymous reader writes Nielsen is going to start studying the streaming behavior of online viewers for the first time. Netflix has never released detailed viewership data, but Nielsen says they have developed a way for its rating meters to track shows by identifying their audio. From the article: "Soon Nielsen, the standard-bearer for TV ratings, may change that. The TV ratings company revealed to the Wall Street Journal that it's planning to begin tracking viewership of online video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video in December by analyzing the audio of shows that are being streamed. The new ratings will come with a lot of caveats—they won't track mobile devices and won't take into account Netflix's large global reach—but they will provide a sense for the first time which Netflix shows are the most popular. And if the rest of the media world latches onto these new ratings as a standard, Netflix won't be able to ignore them."

Comments

What service, exactly, is Nielsen providing?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> they will provide a sense for the first time which Netflix shows are the most popular

Umm...wouldn't Netflix already have this information at its fingertips in its own logs?

Re:What service, exactly, is Nielsen providing?

[DerekLyons]

Netfilx has it - the folks that want to sell shows to Netflix, the folks that have shows on Netflix and want to keep them honest, etc... etc... these are the people who are the Nielsen's customers for this data.

Re:What service, exactly, is Nielsen providing?

[houghi]

This is not to give data to Netflix. This is to give data to advertising companies. That way they have a way of comparing.

Re:What service, exactly, is Nielsen providing?

[medv4380]

Yes, but not given publicly. This is so that shows can use the ratings as leverage in negotiating contracts with Netflix. Which is also why netflix doesn't release the data publicly. They don't want some show figuruing out that half the netflix audiance watches the same program every time it's pushed out. They might think they have an angle and try to get more money out of netflix, or more money out of one of their competitors by offering and exclusive deal. Like Downton Abbey giving exclusive rights to Amazon because they needed something to get people to watch Amazon over Hulu.

The point of such a service has evolved.

[Junta]

In the TV market, they were valued because the cable/broadcast/satellite services had no idea what frequency band users were paying attention to and thus no idea what was effective and what was not without some proactive examination of the viewer base. This was important for the program producers to value product placement, integrated advertising, and for the cable/satellite people to know what content was worth/not worth licensing.

For unicast streaming, the streaming service knows *precisely* what the users are paying attention to. For content producers, they control the licensing terms so they should be able to force Hulu, Amazon, and netflix to provide data as part of the deal of licensing it, in order to have data for soliciting things like product placement.
The streaming services themselves have all the data they need to entice advertisers that are independent of the content. Additionally, the advertisements are in no way hard linked to the streaming media. If the service wants to show you that ad, they don't need to give a rat's ass about *which* program you are watching.
Certainly the people providing the service know which pieces of content they license and how much they are watched to evaluate relative value of their library.

So the two remaining purposes are to let Amazon know which parts of Netflix library are valuable enough to fight for versus not bothering, and academic curiosity of the viewership. Of course, the former might be workable by requesting the data from the content owners as part of negotiations, and the latter doesn't really mean revenue...

Re:What about SSL?

[GuldKalle]

It's still encrypted when played back, so it's just white noise. Netflix installs a decryption implant as part of the subscription.

What?

[roc97007]

> Nielsen Will Start Tracking Netflix and Amazon Video

What, you mean they haven't been tracking on demand and streaming video? Then, how are they at all relevant? The TV Tray Generation, who watches TV in real time and sits through the commercials, have been dying out for some time, and as a group are all but irrelevant now.

Thinking about it, this may help to explain why network suits regularly drop promising series that go on to become streaming favorites. It's not just that they don't understand their audience, but also that they're going by statistics from an organization that also no longer understands their audience.

Cheapest and simplest solution

[Kevin Fishburne]

Write a bot to track The Pirate Bay. They give you the program name, upload date, and number of seeds and peers in real-time. They don't even require registration for this information, much less payment. Sure the data would require a little interpretation and extrapolation, but I can think of no better measure of success and popularity.