Nielsen will stop providing its standalone consumer panel-based television ratings later in 2025. It is the end of an era of decades of relying on panel-based measurement. The Media Rating Council has approved the Nielsen Big Data + Panel approach to national television measurement in the United States. Nielsen hopes that it will enable it to compete better with rivals that have embraced more direct measurement technologies.
“The accreditation of Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel is a landmark moment for TV ratings, as it will forever change audience measurement,” said Karthik Rao, the chief executive of Nielsen. “No one else pairs a high quality, representative panel with a data set this large, pulling from smart TVs and set top boxes in more than 45 million homes. I believe Big Data + Panel gives the industry the most accurate measurement in the history of TV.”
Big data refers to return-path data from cable and satellite set-top boxes, as well as automatic content recognition data from smart televisions connected to the internet.
Big Data + Panel National TV Measurement combines representative panel measurement with data from cable, satellite set-top boxes and smart televisions.
Nielsen partners with companies like Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, Roku and Vizio, providing access to granular data from 45 million households and 75 million devices in the United States. Nielsen is also incorporating first-party data from participating streaming services to help measure audiences for live streaming events. These are massive datasets that capture TV viewing at the device level.
This data is combined with representative household panels to calibrate the device level data, assign viewing demographically, and project audience estimates to the entire television population, not just those in the big data dataset.
Big Data + Panel was widely adopted by many broadcasters and agencies for the 2024 Upfront season and Nielsen is endorsing its use as currency heading into the 2025 Upfront.
The approval of the Big Data + Panel approach by the Media Rating Council follows a period during the coronavirus pandemic when Nielsen lost backing for its national ratings service for months following claims of underreporting audiences.
Many major media companies have been using other measurement services such as VideoAmp, Comscore and iSpot in addition to Nielsen. In September, Paramount stopped using Nielsen data.
Last November, Nielsen won approval for the use of first-party live streaming data from media companies, which was backed by Amazon and the National Football League.