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    Nielsen Numbers To Include Out-of-Home Viewing; Ratings Week In Review

    By SHOOTUpdated:No Comments2929 Views
    People eat and watch football at a Buffalo Wild Wings, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019, in Las Vegas. MGM Resorts International and Buffalo Wild Wings are launching a mobile football game app for customers to pick favorite NFL teams, choose weekly fantasy performers and make proposition picks. Officials said the goal is to expand later at Buffalo Wild Wings in states where sports betting is legal through a mobile app called BetMGM. (AP Photo/John Locher)

    By David Bauder, Media Writer

    NEW YORK (AP) --

    Television networks will be happy to know that ratings will go up for many of their programs next year, simply because the Nielsen company will count more people.

    The company whose numbers provide the currency for the TV industry says its change will begin next September, when it begins accounting for people who watch outside of their homes. That news, first reported in Variety, means that people who watch in bars, airports or offices will be accounted for in the measurements used to set advertising rates.

    That’s been a long time coming for networks, which have been prodding Nielsen to find a way to pick up this extra viewership for years. CNBC stopped subscribing to Nielsen four years ago, feeling cheated because Nielsen didn’t count people who watched business coverage in offices.

    “We think it’s important,” said Scott Brown, a Nielsen executive, on Tuesday. “We know that this is real viewership that wasn’t being counted or measured and our goal is to measure everyone that is watching.”

    Based on its tests, Nielsen predicts that its count of people watching sports events will go up an average of 11 percent. News shows are averaging a 7 percent increase. For networks that traffic in that programming, that’s real money — numbers that can be incorporated in what they charge for commercial time.

    For example, Nielsen reported in February that 100.7 million people watched the Super Bowl. But with out-of-home viewership is counted, that added 12 million people.

    Nielsen has spent years tinkering with the technology to achieve this, where viewership is counted through a portable device that picks up embedded audio signals. Typically, in-home viewership is counted through a device attached to television sets.

    As the system has been tested for the past two years, Nielsen has been selling the out-of-home measurements to specific clients as an extra service.

    Football is back in the picture now, and in last week’s ratings NBC was the biggest beneficiary. The network’s two prime-time NFL games helped it dominate the weekly competition, where NBC averaged 8.8 million viewers.

    CBS landed in second with 3.7 million viewers, ABC had 3.5 million, Fox had 3.3 million, ION Television had 1.3 million, Univision had 1.2 million, Telemundo had 1.1 million and the CW had 610,000.

    Serena Williams may have failed in her attempt to win a 24th Grand Slam title at the U.S. Open, but she was a ratings winner. ESPN’s coverage of the women’s U.S. Open Final reached 3.22 million viewers, while the men’s final had 2.75 million. The men competed against opening weekend of the NFL, however.

    ESPN was the week’s most popular cable network, averaging 2.58 million viewers in prime time. Fox News Channel had 2.15 million, MSNBC had 1.37 million, HGTV had 1.2 million and TLC had 1.07 million.

    ABC’s “World News Tonight” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.4 million viewers. NBC’s “Nightly News” was second with 7.5 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 5.4 million viewers.

    Below are primetime viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for Sept. 2-8. Listings include the week’s ranking and viewership.

    1. NFL Football: Green Bay at Chicago, NBC, 22.24 million.
    2. NFL Football: Pittsburgh at New England, NBC, 22.21 million.
    3. “NFL Thursday Pre-game,” NBC, 14.79 million.
    4. NFL Football: Detroit at Arizona, Fox, 13.99 million.
    5. “NFL Sunday Pre-game,” NBC, 10.72 million.
    6. “NFL Opening Kickoff Show,” NBC, 10.69 million.
    7. “NFL Post-game,” Fox, 9.8 million.
    8. “America’s Got Talent” (Tuesday), NBC, 9.11 million.
    9. College Football: LSU at Texas, ABC, 8.63 million.
    10. “America’s Got Talent” (Wednesday), NBC, 8.56 million.
    11. “60 Minutes,” CBS, 7.56 million.
    12. “Football Night in America, Part 3,” NBC, 7.51 million.
    13. College Football: Notre Dame at Louisville, ESPN, 5.68 million.
    14. “Football Night in America, Part 2,” NBC, 5.34 million.
    15. “NCIS,” CBS, 5.21 million.
    16. “Big Brother” (Sunday), CBS, 4.75 million.
    17. “American Ninja Warrior,” NBC, 4.47 million.
    18. “Big Brother” (Wednesday), CBS, 4.46 million.
    19. “FBI,” CBS, 4.21 million.
    20. “Big Brother” (Thursday), CBS, 4.18 million.

    ABC and ESPN are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; CBS is a division of CBS Corp.; Fox is owned by Fox Corp.; NBC is owned by NBC Universal.

    Category:News
    Tags:NFLNielsen



    A Closer Look At Proposed Measures Designed To Curb Google’s Search Monopoly

    Thursday, November 21, 2024

    U.S. regulators are proposing aggressive measures to restore competition to the online search market after a federal judge ruled Google maintained an illegal monopoly for the last decade.

    The sweeping set of recommendations filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice could radically alter Google's business, including possibly spinning off the Chrome web browser and syndicating its search data to competitors. Even if the courts adopt the blueprint, Google isn't likely to make any significant changes until 2026 at the earliest, because of the legal system's slow-moving wheels.

    Here's what it all means:

    What is the Justice Department's goal?
    Federal prosecutors are cracking down on Google in a case originally filed during near the end of then-President Donald Trump's first term. Officials say the main goal of these proposals is to get Google to stop leveraging its dominant search engine to illegally squelch competition and stifle innovation.

    "The playing field is not level because of Google's conduct, and Google's quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired," the Justice Department asserted in its recommendations. "The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages."

    Not surprisingly, Google sees things much differently. The Justice Department's "wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court's decision," Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer, asserted in a blog post. "It would break a range of Google products — even beyond search — that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives."

    It's still possible that the Justice Department could ease off on its attempts to break up Google, especially if President-elect Donald Trump... Read More

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