Nielsen has renamed its integrated television and online viewing initiative from "TV Everywhere" to "TVandPC." While I would have preferred Nielsen just call it "TV and PC" the renaming is smart since the "TV Everywhere" was easily confused with the online initiatives from cable companies dubbed "TV Everywhere."
Nielsen is on track to measure integrated television and online viewing for shows that air the same commercials online as aired on TV this September, but it will use results beginning in September only for evaluation purposes. The evaluation period is schedule to end in February 2011.
C3 is the measurement of commercial viewing live and up to three days after the show initially aired. Again, shows that don't include the same commercials online that ran on TV will not be included in the measurements, but shows that do use the same commercials will be counted up to three days after the show aired.
A lot of questions remain, like whether Hulu's Jason Kilar will agree to the huge increases in the number of commercials this will bring for Hulu, or whether Jason Kilar will be looking for a new job. There's really not much of a compromise in-between because ABC, NBC and FOX are going to want to make as much money as they can on the Hulu viewing and they will make TV dollars rather than digital dimes for the online viewing, provided it includes the full commercial load.
Though holding the shows off Hulu for three days and airing them with fewer commercials might be an option, I can't imagine it's an attractive option for the networks whose parent companies have invested in Hulu.
Would this affect the renewal/cancel prospects of a show?
I doubt it will at this point but it’s actually encouraging they are actually moving forward on this.
the potential exists if there is huge online viewing for shows and the online viewing is far out of proportion to the tv viewing vs. other shows (let’s say two shows had the same numbers on TV, but one show had 1 million adults 18-49 on the Internet, and the other only had 200,000).
Based on everything I’ve seen currently viewing of shows online is not that high and there is a lot more DVR viwewing of shows than online viewing. But online viewing has an advantage for the networks vs. DVR: people won’t be able to fast-forward through commercials. Some will say that might be a disadvantage though since with more commercials people will be less inclined to watch online.
If it turns out that it does impact certain shows, that’s bad news for our “renew/cancel” index since we don’t get the C3 data and I doubt Nielsen will provide much public data about online program (vs. commercial viewing) within the first 3 days.
More questions all around than answers at this point. It will be interesting to watch it all unfold.
I usually watch shows on my Tivo. If I somehow missed a show, I would watch them on Hulu. If Hulu suddenly had full length commercials, I would use ‘other’ online sources. I don’t watch commercials anymore. I know that advertising is how shows are paid for, but I simply refuse to sit through that boring crap anymore. I get all the boring crap I need watching this season of Heroes.
The networks need to figure out a way to get advertisers to pay a premium for online viewers. There’s no getting around the ads online, unlike on TV.
The problem with this is that if the online viewing can boost ratings then people will attempt to save their shows by click-fraud type techniques. i.e. leave the show running on the PC while you’re not actually there. You could add click to continue like I think ABC used to do, but that’s really annoying.
It would be a simple matter to only count one viewing per IP address. There are ways to spoof that but it’ll take most of the Joss Whedon fans out of the picture.
Lurker: Nielson isn’t measuring online viewing for everyone…I believe its still through sampling.
Based on what I understand now, Roland is correct. Nielsen will be measuring online viewing for a portion of its current TV sample. I think they’d like to get everyone in their current TV sample measured, but they’ve already said that they expect to not be able to get everyone’s agreement.
I think Roland’s point was that Lurker’s fear that the online viewing could be gamed is unwarranted because it’s still through sampling and Roland is correct.
To Bill’s point, Nielsen plans to use its national panel which is roughly 20,000 homes and 60,000 people. But only about 7,500 homes in the panel, or just over 1/3rd are expected to participate in the TVandPC measurement.
Lots of people do not want their online stuff measured/metered, and some part of the panel doesn’t have Internet or broadband internet access)
I don’t understand why hulu would not make more money doing ads that are specific to me. Why do I need female eyelash ads. They already know I am a man!