Nielsen: Platforms Rising Yet TV Still Dominates

Despite the rise in mobile devices, traditional platforms remain the primary way people are consuming media, Nielsen’s svp insights and analysis Glenn Enoch told TCA critics Wednesday. “The time that people spend with traditional [live] TV and AM/FM radio”…still accounts for 49 hours a week of media consumption, Enoch said, quoting data in Nielsen’s latest “Total Audience Report.”

Of course, fragmentation of media consumption continues to grow and Nielsen is readying products that will allow for apples-to-apples comparisons between viewing consumption via TV and on PCs, smartphones and tablets, said Lynda Clarizio, president, U.S. Media, Nielsen. Along with Adobe, Nielsen will launch products under the umbrella of Digital-TV Ratings. Total Content Ratings will create “consistent metric for all video across TV and digital…allowing digital and TV to compare reach versus reach, average-minute to average-minute…so it’s our normal television viewing along with all time-shifted viewing.” The products are in beta and will be available next year.

Today, many people use Nielsen metrics incorrectly, she said. They misconstrue the average-minute-view number, also called the Nielsen rating, with the reach number, or unique viewers for all of television. Often when speaking about digital, people use the large reach number and compare it to the average-minute-view number, which usually is far smaller.

Nielsen today is not “directly” measuring the use of SVOD devices, such as Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video. As a result, Nielsen can’t answer the question of whether or not these platforms are displacing TV viewing, Enoch said. What it can say, however, is that SVOD-enabled HHs watch a bit less TV, 12 minutes less on a 3-month basis, and spend more time watching content on devices. But what Nielsen sees is that SVOD HHs “were much more likely to drop SVOD” than cable service. People are using SVOD “more like a premium pay service,” an add-on, Enoch said.

Bringing some controversy to the session, Adobe’s Jennifer Cooper, global head of media of publishing and MVPD industry strategy, while agreeing with Enoch’s data, disagreed with his analysis about cable’s stickiness. “Cable is…the pipe of the Internet into the home. That’s why cable, as a provider, continues to actually dominate,” she said. In addition, she said Apple TV “is running away with the [TV Everywhere] market… And I can tell you that it is driven by ease of use, it is driven by content availability, and it is driven by connectivity to other like type devices that you can access and program.”