Smart Screen Exclusive

Add this to the be-careful-what-you-wish-for file: After pleading for years for more and better data on cross-platform viewership the TV industry is about to get hit by waves of the stuff. Whether the industry sinks or swims in it will depend on whether it can agree on what all the new data means.

Nielsen this month began showing its long-awaited Total Audience Measurement product to clients as it prepares for a December rollout. The ratings company promises to deliver for the first time apples-to-apples measurement of viewing across live TV, DVR, VOD, connected TV devices (Roku, Apple TV, etc.), mobile, PCs and tablets.

Even viewing on platforms that prefer not to be rated, like Netflix and Hulu, will get counted as part of the mix through the use of audio recognition technology, as will content on YouTube.

Nielsen is about to face increased competition, however from the newly merged Rentrak and comScore, who plan to offer cross-platform TV ratings using a combination of set-top box data collected by Rentrak and comScore’s digital measurements.

Both Nielsen and comScore/Rentrak could also soon be facing off against new data suppliers. TiVo announced this week that it will begin giving away demographic ratings data from 2 million TiVo boxes in the first quarter of 2016.

At the same time, Comcast has begun talking to the networks about providing them with set-top box data from its 22 million subscribers, having previously turned down a $100 million offer from Nielsen for the same information.

Comcast currently makes that data available to NBC and to the NBCUniversal cable networks.

While all the new data will no doubt be pored over eagerly by network programmers and advertisers, whether the two will find a way to use it to do business together is another question.

For all the data already pouring out of set-top boxes and other sources, TV advertising today is still sold largely on C3 and C7 ratings gathered from Nielsen’s panel of 20,000 diary households (slated to expand to 40,000 next year).

Earlier this month Nielsen convened a group of 25 top industry executives, from both the network and advertising sides, to begin discussing how to turn the new Total Audience data into standard metrics that could be used as currency in setting ad rates.

“The question is what are the buyers and sellers prepared to agree to, so what is the actual, definitive data point or multiple data points that they are going to agree to guarantee against?,” Nielsen EVP Megan Clarken told Adweek. Today, that is the C3/C7 ratings for TV, and on the digital side, it’s viewability, it’s DAR [digital ad ratings]. The two sides need to come together.”

With new data vendors now challenging Nielsen to be the standard-setter, however, settling on a single advertising currency may prove harder than collecting the data itself.