NBCUniversal (NSDQ: CMCSA)
will once again use its Olympics coverage to search for what it calls
the “holy grail” of audience measurement. The media conglomerate has
commissioned Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and research company comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) to develop new ways to measure viewership across broadcast, cable, internet and mobile platforms.
The 2012 London Games, which run for two weeks starting July
27, will be the third consecutive Olympics in which NBCU will conduct
this kind of research. With the company offering its coverage across
many platforms over a finite period of time, the Games typically provide
an optimal test subject to conduct research on new metrics, NBCU
officials say. This time, however, the company is approaching the development of a so-called “single-source” metric with a little more urgency. Powerful voices within the TV industry are calling for an overhaul of Nielsen’s analog ratings system, which has a relatively small sample of 25,000 homes still manually filling out usage diaries on what they watch on TV, and has no way of measuring audience beyond traditional TV platforms.
At the Consumer Electronics Show last month, Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) TV Group president and TV Academy chairman Bruce Rosenblum struck an industry chord when he equated the current ratings system to living in the “dark ages” and said it was “embarrassing” to the business. Having conducted experiments for the 2008 Beijing and 2010 Vancouver Games with tiny panels of 60 viewers or less, NBCU’s research this time around will feature much bigger audience samples.
Google plans to create a panel of about 3,000 consumers, using a meter-based system to track viewership across platforms. Google will also create algorithms specifically designed to measure this usage.
ComScore, meanwhile, will cull 750 Olympics enthusiasts from the 10,000-member audience panel it developed with AT&T (NYSE: T) AdWorks. Viewership data from this group will be compiled from a combination of AT&T U-verse set-top boxes, electronic meters and the self-reporting by panelist.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nbcu-taps-google-to-create-cross-platform-audience-metric-for-2012-olym
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