New Ratings For the New Year

The industry has yet to embrace a currency for crossplatform measurement, but researchers note that significant progress has been made in the last year.

Comscore is now beta-testing its campaign ratings system with 10 leading media companies, with plans to go live in the first half of 2019, president Sarah Hofstetter said. “2019 will be the year of cross platform video measurement,” she said.

“There has been much more urgency among the networks in the last year than I’ve ever seen to improve measurement,” added Jane Clarke, CEO and managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), added. “They are starting to see that they need to change the currency.”

Clarke also noted that Nielsen’s system for measuring viewing on Netflix — once a black hole — is giving people much better sense of how their content is performing on SVOD services and that this year’s upfront will see “two currencies being tested at the same time.”

The EIDR (Entertainment ID Registry) has made progress in getting industry acceptance for its system of tagging content so it can be measured across platforms around the world, executive director Will Kreth said. “You have to have crossplatform measurement because we live in a world where you can just measure viewing on last night’s broadcast if you want to see how your premium content is performing,” he said.

More from Viewer Watch 2019:
Hard to See
Adjusting to a Post Peak TV World
Digital Margins Pose a Dilemma
Engaging With Old and New Platforms
If You Build It …
What to Watch at CES
Viewer Watch: The Charts