Live-Only Ratings Revived

Nielsen has told clients it will bring back its 'live-only' television ratings, dropped in April in favour of a measurement combining live and time-shifted viewing. The company says it has not changed its view that live/same day is a better measure, but can now offer both due to increased data capacity.

The re-introduction will take effect with the start of the 2010-11 TV season, at the end of August, with backdated files for April-August to allow comparisons. In the Spring, Nielsen had said that it was not able to provide more than three streams of data, and chose to include live/same day, live/plus 3 and live/plus 7 figures, a decision criticised by many advertisers sceptical about the attention paid to ads in recorded shows.

In a letter to clients last Thursday (July 1st) Sabrina Crow, Nielsen's SVP, Managing Director, Local Media Client Services, said of the April decision: 'we believed (and still believe) that the Live Same Day, Live Plus 3 and Live Plus 7 streams were the most reflective measures of how people watch television. Given our capacity limitations, the feedback we received from the industry as a whole, and Nielsen and client analysis of consumers' viewing patterns, we eliminated Live Only ratings from our local overnights and electronic data files.

'Our plan has always been to add more capacity. Since the beginning of the year, we have done extensive work necessary to provide an additional data stream and as a result of this work are now able to add a fourth stream. We are restoring Live Only as the fourth stream, given the strong interest in this stream by some of our clients.' The stream will be restored in Local People Meter (LPM) and Set Meter markets for both the NSI and NHSI (Hispanic) samples.

Crow said that neither Live Only nor Live Same Day ratings are 'an ideal substitute' for the C3 ratings received by national clients - these include time-shifted viewing of average commercial minute ratings, while local TV ratings so far do not measure commercial viewing, just the programming. She hinted however that local television may get a commercial ratings solution soon, writing: 'We are actively exploring alternatives which might more closely mirror the national C3 methodology at the local level. To that end, we have been working with the ANA and select advertisers to test the concept of commercial encoding.'

Web site: www.nielsen.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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