NEW YORK—Nielsen has announced plans in 2024 to expand coverage of its National TV out-of-home (OOH) panel in order to fully represent all U.S. TV households.
The move will be particularly important for broadcasters, channels and streaming platforms airing sports, news and other high profile live events.
"Nielsen is highly focused on innovating in order to better serve our clients and ensure our measurement accounts for the full landscape of television consumption," said Deirdre Thomas, chief product officer, audience measurement at Nielsen. "We understand how important it is for our clients to be able to have the most complete picture of the audience, especially for special events like the Super Bowl."
"We are appreciative of Nielsen's efforts to make out-of-home measurement more complete, providing a much clearer picture of the true audience for all television viewing and especially sports viewership," said Paul Ballew, chief data and analytics officer of the NFL. "For years we have been consistent in our belief that major sports events, like the upcoming Super Bowl LVIII, are often viewed with family and friends in large gatherings and this expanded out-of-home viewership will be crucial to measuring those events."
Nielsen plans to provide impact data in Q4 2024, in time for Super Bowl LIX.
For nearly a decade, Nielsen has been capturing viewing that occurs outside of the home, including airports, hotels, bars and restaurants. Through proprietary Portable People Meter (PPM) Wearables technology, Nielsen has delivered metrics for out-of-home audiences to ensure clients can track viewer consumption regardless of the platform, screen or location. By adding additional homes to the PPM Wearables footprint, Nielsen's OOH coverage will expand from 65% to 100%.
Nielsen stressed that capturing this viewing audience is critical for genres of television that people tend to watch communally, particularly sporting events, which continue to grow as one the most important programming genres in live television. Nielsen data shows that in 2023, fans in the U.S. spent more than 1.7 trillion minutes watching games from the five most-watched sports leagues.
As people's consumption of streaming TV grows - to 36% of total television usage as of December 2023, according to Nielsen's The Gauge – the importance of measuring live sports and other "appointment" viewing on both linear and streaming also grows, Nielsen said.
With streaming services increasingly tapping into the live sports space, there is additional demand for measurement of this audience, Nielsen also noted in explaining the expansion of its OOH viewing efforts.
