New Ratings Consortium Formed to Measure Cross-Platform Viewing

The Financial Times reported Thursday that a group of US companies has formed a TV/video ratings consortium to challenge Nielsen. Participants in the consortium which, according to the article, will be operational next month, include media companies, NBC Universal, News Corp, Time Warner, CBS, Viacom, Discovery, and Disney; media agencies, GroupM and Starcom MediaVest; and advertisers, Procter & Gamble, AT&T (the largest and third-largest US advertiser respectively) and Unilever. The consortium is believed to have been formed in order to provide a single source for audience measurement across traditional TV and new digital video platforms: "The most deficient thing is there's no single source measurement [for TV and digital video]," Sam Armando, SVP of audience analysis at Starcom Mediavest, told the Financial Times.

According to the newspaper, "people briefed" on the consortium's plans expect it to begin awarding contracts for measuring set-top box data and cross-platform viewership as soon as the fourth quarter. While Nielsen operates a "convergence panel" of around 2,800 consumers that measures the correlations between TV and Internet video usage, the Financial Times reported, it is not part of the national sample on which ratings are based. A full roll-out of the convergence panel is not expected to take place until 2011.