Nielsen is telling clients that it didn’t include out-of-home viewing recorded by its Portable People Meters in its ratings going back to September 2020, compounding questions about the accuracy of its measurement system.

In a letter, Nielsen blamed the error on a software issue. 

“As a result, out-of-home viewing estimates may be understated. While there is little to no impact to most telecasts, we did find larger variances for events that tend to yield larger out-of-home audiences such as live sporting events,” Nielsen said in its letter.

Nielsen did not say now big the undercounts were.  Nielsen began adding out-of-home viewing to its ratings in 2020.

The new issue follows the revelation that Nielsen undercounted TV viewing during the pandemic. After prodding by the VAB — which represents the television networks — Nielsen and the Media Rating Council confirmed the undercount, saying it found that total usage of television by persons 18-49, the key demo used to sell advertising, was understated by approximately 2% to 6% for the February 2021 measurement period. 

In February, according to Nielsen, TV ad spending was $3.9 billion. A 1% undercount would represent $468 million and 6% would be $2.8 billion, the VAB said.

The Media Rating Council also withdrew its accreditation of Nielsen’s national ratings service, the equivalent of Nielsen losing the industry’s seal of approval.

With Nielsen under pressure, the industry has stepped up its efforts to find alternatives to Nielsen. NBCUniversal issued requests for proposals that have been returned by about 80 data and measurement companies. The VAB also has set up a Measurement Innovation Task Force to seek more up-to-date measurement approaches.

“Today’s announcement by Nielsen of more systemic errors that have further undercounted TV ratings for the last sixteen months is unfathomable, both for Nielsen and the buyers and sellers that use Nielsen data as trading currency,” said Sean Cunningham, CEO of the VAB.

“.While the VAB and our Measurement Innovation Task Force have been looking to build back confidence in Nielsen’s core measurement capabilities, the timing of this latest and stunning omission of OOH viewership not being counted across the growing broadband only home universe coincides with our recent discovery of significant defects in Nielsen’s overall plans to include broadband only homes in early 2022 for Local TV,” Cunningham said. “Given the unprecedented scale of Nielsen’s 2021 undercounting and the depths of discovered defects in their core competency on TV measurement, we are greatly concerned that Nielsen One is being built atop a broken and defective measurement and currency foundation.” 

Nielsen is in the process of building and launching Nielsen One, its new system for measuring viewing of programming and advertising across all screens in a consistent and comparable manner.

"As part of routine testing and quality controls, we recently identified an error that caused an understatement of reported out-of-home audiences for our National TV service,” Nielsen said in a statement. “While there is no impact to most telecasts, and no impact to local television, we did find some variances for events that tend to yield larger out-of-home audiences, such as live sporting events. The error has been corrected and Nielsen will be reissuing data from September 2020 to present in order to provide the industry with the most complete data."

Nielsen said the software issues would be corrected starting with its ratings for Dec. 22. Nielsen will also be reissuing its data from September 2020 through Dec. 2021.

If you’re a content or channel provider, it’s easy to get caught up in the dizzying array of options you have for getting your content to your audience. What’s the best strategy?

Whether you are a well-established content provider or new streaming brand, the pursuit of new viewers has become more costly and complex in our multiplatform world. As the competition has grown, content brands have been seeing the wisdom in additional distribution strategies, including ad-supported video-on-demand channels on platforms like Pluto, Xumo, tubi, fuboTV and more.

And why not? Isn’t a good financial adviser’s advice always to diversify your portfolio in order to take advantage of emerging trends and protect yourself in a constantly changing business environment?

That seems to be the siren call of channel and content providers — be everywhere viewers are! Well, while channels vie for launches on consumer-focused apps, OTT platforms, cable platforms and other digital channel aggregators, there is another distribution opportunity that has left a massive audience largely untapped for both traditional cable channels and streaming-first brands.

The out-of-home (OOH) video market includes video watched in every space outside of one’s own home or personal devices. And I’m sure you’re thinking about those TVs in your local bar or gym, and you’d be right, but add to that restaurants, hotels, casinos, live event venues, spas, salons, airports, medical offices, department or any retail store chain … the list goes on.

It’s a large enough audience that Nielsen announced it would incorporate out-of-home viewing in its national ratings. Sports networks, for example, can see an average lift of 11% in total audience when OOH viewership is integrated, according to Nielsen.

Historically out-of-home video/TV fell into two buckets: (1) residential cable or satellite that reached the audience but was lacking in a fundamental understanding of the out-ofhome market and how to measure it; and (2) place based out-of-home video networks like Captivate and CNN Airport that provided targeted audiences but with a limited footprint of locations. But OTT has, well, kicked both buckets!

With the consumer market well into year five of massive cord-cutting and streaming now no longer novel, the out-of-home market is starting to follow suit. Like consumers, businesses are looking to find ways to save on their bloated bundles, but they also want to have access to content that is unavailable through their cable or satellite subscriptions. Even beyond that, businesses want better alignment between the content they feature and the physical spaces in which it is featured. This introduces vast new opportunities for specialized content providers — Fashion TV, for example — as well as new content packages from large content brands, such as news packages for Gen Zers in college. OTT-delivered channels and content provide the kind of flexibility for businesses and variety for out-of-home viewers at a more affordable cost.

OTT-based platforms allow content providers to extend their reach and get more value out of their investments in packaging and distributing their content on other streaming platforms simply by easily ingesting feeds from partners like Wurl, Amagi, Zixi and Disney Streaming Services.

But it’s not just a matter of getting another platform launch. Being available on a platform that can put you in front of hundreds of millions of viewers in gyms across the country, or people waiting for their flight in the airport, or groups of friends watching together in bars and restaurants … it adds up.

To discount the out-of-home market’s importance is to miss the opportunity to reach coveted audiences. Nielsen found that 39% of all out-of-home viewing came from Gen Zs and millennials, of 14% more than their national in-home viewing.

Like any solid financial strategy, if you want to hedge your bets and future-proof your investment, then look to build a balanced portfolio. In the content business, there’s just too much money on the table not to include out-of-home in your overall distribution strategy.

Garrett Dodge is CEO of Rockbot, a streaming TV and music platform for businesses. 

While networks fret that they’ve been abandoned by younger viewers, Nielsen said they’re watching linear TV content, but they’re not sitting in the living room while they're watching.

It’s true that younger viewers are among the most active video streamers, but the relatively affluent members of the millennial generation and Generation Z are also watching linear TV content in out-of-home locations, according to a new Nielsen report.

With Nielsen measuring out of home viewing more thoroughly, and more ad buyers accepting out-of-home viewing among the impressions they pay for, the finding could mean extra dollars for TV networks.

Related: Nielsen Offers Quicker Data on Out-of-Home Viewing

ESPN was one of the first networks to subscribe to Nielsen’s Out-of-Home reporting service and use those extra viewers in negotiations with advertisers. Adding viewing in bars, health clubs, offices and mass transit lifts ESPN’s viewership by 8.5%, the network said.

Turner and CBS have also signed up for Nielsen’s Out-of-Home service.

Related: ESPN Touts Effectiveness of Commercials Seen Out of Home

In its new report, Nielsen looked at all out-of-home viewing during 2017. It found that 39% of all out-of home-viewing came from Gen Z and millennials, or 14% more than their national in-home viewing.

News viewing is usually thought to be largely confined to older viewers, but when looking at out-of-home consumption, the share represented by millennials and Gen Zers nearly tripled. Gen X’s share was also higher out-of-home (23%) than in-home (18%).

Nearly half of the out-of-home viewing for sports came from Gen Z and millennials.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Tunity, a startup that has built a mobile app that lets users hear live audio streams while viewing muted televisions, has snatched a sizable round of funding as it looks to pursue a business model based on providing key insights on out-of-home TV viewing, as well as targeted advertising opportunities.

Fresh off a $12 million A round — and a signed partnership with MGM Resorts — Tunity is now starting to fine tune its business plans, along with its mobile app and cloud-based platform; together, the app and platform enable consumers watching muted TVs in venues such as sports bars, airports, waiting rooms or gyms to stream a channel’s synced-up audio feed on their smartphones.

Tunity claims its app, available for Android and iOS mobile devices, has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It currently supports more than 100 channels in the U.S., including ABC, AMC, Bravo, CBS, CNN, Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, ESPN and beIN Sports, among dozens of others.

To enable the video-audio synchronization, users of Tunity’s mobile app are directed to scan nearby TVs so its cloud-based deep learning technology can identify the live video stream and match it with the right audio feed, which is then streamed to the user’s smartphone.

Under this process, the scan from the user’s mobile phone sends that information, including a few captured video frames and the user’s location, to Tunity’s platform, which analyzes the images and the location to determine the correct live TV channel.

From there, it creates a system time stamp to ensure that the audio that’s streamed to the smartphone is synchronized as closely as possible to the video that users are viewing.

New Stamping Grounds
As for that deep-learning bit, Tunity uses all of this data to constantly “train” its servers to improve its time-stamping and synchronization capabilities.

Rather than one-off attempts at this synchronization, Tunity’s system has an historical database that, it claims, helps the system’s “neural network” become better over time on an almost linear basis, Yaniv Davidson, Tunity’s founder, explained. “The more data you have, the better your algorithm and the better that your neural network works,” he said.

Related: Big Data Getting Bigger Thanks to Mobile Apps, Report Says

Tunity’s location-based system (using the phone’s WiFi or cellular connection) is also in place to ensure that users are getting the audio when they are in front of or somehow nearby the TV, and can’t simply set the scan to receive the audio stream and then go on their merry way. If users move away from the TV (perhaps by as much as 100 to 160 meters), the audio stream is shut off and they are given a notice to rescan in order to restart it.

Tunity is experimenting with its business models and exploring future revenue opportunities.

Selling data and insight on out-of-home viewing to programmers and other partners is a model that it’s initially looking into.

For its part, Nielsen has acknowledged that out-of-home viewing provides a ratings lift, albeit one that varies by programming type, viewer demographic and age group. Recent data from Nielsen, for example, found that 26% of OOH impressions came from viewers 18-34, versus 32% from viewers 55 or older. However, nearly 60% of OOH impressions come from the core buying demographic, according to Nielsen.

“Out-of-home is going to become a more important part of linear TV,” Davidson said, hopeful that Tunity’s data can complement existing ratings systems or provide some additional second-by-second data to networks.

Tunity is also taking a look at how it can create targeted advertising that is relevant to what the viewer is watching.

Tunity conducted a small experiment during a televised NASCAR race where a native pop-up on the phone asked viewers if they wanted to pre-order the racing game NASCAR Heat Evolution. They could decline it or accept it. If accepted, they would be sent to a dedicated landing page to complete the pre-order process. Davidson said the experiment saw a 20% click-through rate.

Founded in 2014, Tunity has about 20 employees, with offices in New York and Israel.

Offering some good news to apps and OTT services such as Watch ESPN, Fox Sports Go, Newsy and CNNgo, sports and news were the most-viewed genres for out-of-home viewing, Nielsen found in a study presented at the Television Critic’s Association tour in Los Angeles.

That study, which also factored in TV viewing at bars, gyms and airports, not just apps on mobile devices, found that sports delivered an out-of-home viewing lift of 9%, another 2 hours and 37 minutes on top of the nearly 30-hour average per person (6 years-plus) watching sports. News was next followed by  children’s multi-weekly programming, general dramas, sports commentary, and sit-coms.  

The study also found that nearly 60% of OOH impressions came way of “core buying demographics,” while OOH viewing among people 18-34 contributed an 8% boost from in-home viewership, and 6% when the group was expanded to 18-49.

“While only a portion of the Nielsen Total Audience, OOH viewing is an integral part to clearly viewing the whole media consumption picture,” Nielsen concluded.