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The struggle to accurately measure local linear television continues, with major measurement providers such as Nielsen and Comscore working to figure out how best to provide TV stations with accurate information on who is watching their over-the-air TV signals in local markets. Meanwhile, TV stations’ digital and streaming products are able to take advantage of all the data and analytics that digital offers at a very granular level.
The issue remains marrying linear with digital to provide a complete measurement picture to both buyers and sellers, said panelists at TVNewsCheck’s TV2025 conference at the NAB Show New York last week.
“We’re at an inflection point,” said Justin Lewis, corporate research director, Sinclair. “We’re to the point where the stresses on the current systems are really, really, really starting to show and everybody involved is starting to adapt and adjust what they offer.”
A big part of the problem remains the challenges with Nielsen’s local panel, which has grown increasingly inaccurate as audiences have fragmented.
“If you’ve got 400, 600, 800, 900 households in the panel, and all of a sudden, you’ve got to make that be 40% to 50% broadband-only homes, that means the people who are traditional viewers in the panel are making up less and less of the sample size,” Lewis said.
“When you talk about 40,000 to 41,000 homes in the panel and then you break that down to a local market where you have only 400 homes in that panel, how do you then start to