Nielsen Total Audience Management Could Lead to TVE Explosion, TDG's Wolk Says

Nielsen's new over-the-top measurement system, Total Audience Management, "will launch a new era" of TV watching, said Diffusion Group senior analyst Alan Wolk in a blog. That metric will lead to more TV Everywhere, which in turn "will boost the amount of television being watched via OTT," Wolk said. If Nielsen's Total Audience Management is successful in counting OTT viewers the way the company currently does with linear watchers, "it could overcome the networks' objections to releasing content for viewing on their own or (multichannel video programming distributor) TV Everywhere device apps," which means more watching and thus higher ratings as well as more bandwidth use -- which is good for multiservice providers, Wolk said. Nielsen's Total Audience Management looks at views over the course of a week, which is "more reflective of how people watch TV now," Wolk said. OTT viewing over the next five years likely will approach 50 percent of all TV viewing, overtaking quadrature amplitude modulation watching, he said Thursday. Nielsen has said it expects to have Total Audience Management largely rolled out by year's end.