After catching heat from linear TV, Nielsen is backing off its plan to include internal data from Amazon in its measurement of the Thursday Night Football audience.
Joe Flint of the Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news. He described Nielsen’s decision as a “win for broadcasters and ESPN” and a “loss for Amazon and NFL.”
Nielsen first announced its plan to supplement its measurement of live, streaming programs with data from the streamers last month. The plan has always been that those numbers would only be used for live events aired exclusively via streaming and not for all streaming programming.
Plenty of broadcast networks called out the plan as unfair. Traditional ratings measurement showed the Thursday Night Football audience as 18% smaller than Amazon’s internal measurement.
“A fair and accurate audience measurement across all platforms is absolutely vital to our industry,” the CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said on a media conference call last month. “Anything that is not impartial and unbiased is unacceptable to us. I must say that we think it’s extremely odd and unfortunate that different rules are suddenly applying to one platform, and I’ll leave it at that.”
Initially, Nielsen pushed back on the criticism. A statement from the company said that some of the complaints about using data from Amazon were based on “misleading and inaccurate information.” The company’s position was that it was important to work with streamers to develop a more accurate way to measure the audience for streaming programs.
