NEWS - Epocale: Nielsen misurerà gli ascolti di Netflix e Amazon dal prossimo mese!

Articolo tratto dal "Wall Street Journal"

Even as Netflix Inc. and other streaming-video providers have expanded to reach 40% of American homes, they have largely remained black boxes. They have refused to share data on how many viewers watch TV shows on their services, and there has been little independent data.
Next month, that will change, when Nielsen begins measuring viewership of TV on subscription online video services for the first time, according to Nielsen client documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The new measurement capability, which Nielsen meters can deliver without the assent of services like Netflix and Amazon.com ’s Prime Instant Video, will analyze the audio components of the program to identify which shows are being streamed. (Nielsen is still working on a way to measure subscription-video viewing on mobile devices, where such technology won’t work.)
The effort is designed to help content owners learn more about the impact of licensing their programs to these streaming players. Big media companies have been generating revenue growth by selling Netflix and Amazon streaming rights to their TV shows, but some are worried that in the long run they could hurt their viewership on traditional, ad-supported television, where they still make the vast majority of their money.
“Our clients will be able to look at their programs and understand: Is putting content on Netflix impacting the viewership on linear and traditional VOD [video on demand]?” said Brian Fuhrer, a a senior vice president at Nielsen.
Netflix and Amazon declined to comment.
The data could ripple through Hollywood, changing the power dynamics in the negotiations between streaming sites and TV studios that license them content.
Currently, the streaming sites have outsize leverage when deals come up for renewal, since only they know how much a show was viewed. The information also will likely help talent in their negotiations with studios.
The Nielsen documents also contain some of the strongest data to date suggesting that time spent on these streaming services is meaningfully eating into traditional television viewing. Television viewing is down 7% for the month ended Oct. 27 from a year earlier among adults 18 to 49, a demographic that advertisers pay a premium to reach.
Meanwhile, subscribership to streaming video services has jumped to 40% of households in September, up from 34% in January, Nielsen found. That is a rate of growth that advertising agency executives who saw the Nielsen document said they found shocking. Netflix accounts for the vast majority of the viewership.
After people sign up for streaming video services, they watch less TV than they used to, Nielsen found: 20% less, in the 18-34 demographic, and 19% less in 25-54.
The report also found that people who are video subscribers, on the whole, watch less TV than nonsubscribers: 20% less, among 18 to 49-year-olds.
“There is a certain indication that as you acquire (subscription online video), your television use, in terms of traditional television use, is going down,” said Dounia Turrill, Nielsen’s senior vice president, client insights. But she said that overall video usage is increasing and that more data are needed to draw definitive conclusions.
As television viewership dropped 8% in the 18-49 demographic in the third quarter, media executives stuck to their regular script—largely playing down the notion that Netflix and other streaming services are sucking away viewers.
The media executives say they aren’t getting full credit from Nielsen for consumption of their content on digital platforms. And they say Nielsen’s decision to count broadband-only homes in its measurement sample accounts for part of the decline in ratings. Philippe Dauman , chief executive of Viacom Inc., which owns Comedy Central and MTV, last week said existing measurement services had “not caught up to the marketplace.” Viacom has experienced double-digit ratings declines at its major networks, including Nickelodeon.
Mr. Dauman cited industry data from comScore, Diffusion Group and Nielsen, showing that the number of minutes of TV shows consumed on subscription video platforms represented just 2% to 3% of the total number of minutes consumed on traditional TV channels.
Todd Juenger, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, believes that increased streaming video consumption is the greatest driver of television’s audience declines—and that those viewers aren’t coming back. He says media companies are injuring themselves when they license their content to companies like Netflix, pocketing the profits in the short term, but feeding a beast that will devour them in the long term.

“You are taking viewers out of the ad-supported universe and putting them into the non-ad-supported universe,” he said. “I don’t see how that’s good for the economic health of the content industry.”
At the moment, Hulu—which has a free, ad-supported version—is the only one of the three biggest streaming video players that works with Nielsen to have its audience measured, and only on desktop computers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The new measurement service starting next month will cover Netflix and Amazon, even though they aren’t actively participating. Netflix has said in the past that it doesn’t need to release its viewership data since it doesn’t sell advertising.
In the beginning, companies will be able to view program ratings only for their own content. But as the tool ramps up, clients will likely be able to subscribe to syndicated viewership data to see ratings of their competitors, just as they do now with traditional TV ratings, Mr. Fuhrer said.