That’s trip for triple, which is what the ratings icon plans to do to its National People Meter research base. By 2011, it plans to up the current households surveyed total from 12K to 37K, with total individuals going from 35K to 100K. The sample increase is deemed necessary to deal with increasingly fragmented US viewing habits and to add "flexibility for measuring non-traditional" viewing. The move also "…supports the more granular measurement that clients are requesting," including provision of commercial minute ratings and measurement of viewing over the internet, with hand-held devices and outside the household.
"With a panel of a hundred thousand people, we can more precisely pinpoint the viewing of all demographic groups and dig deeper into the audience levels for networks of all sizes," said Sara Erichson, Executive Vice President Client Services Nielsen North America.
Scott Springer, Product Leader of Audience Measurement for The Nielsen Company’s Media Segment, added, "Our plans for out-of-home viewing, streaming video on the Internet, and ‘third screen’ devices such as cell phones and hand-held video players, are based on integrating these measurements with traditional television measurement. This much larger national sample creates the necessary foundation for an integrated measurement approach."
Meanwhile, Nielsen’s U.S. Hispanic service has agreed to provide ratings for basic cable service MTV Tres effective 10/1/07. The data will be derived from Nielsen’s 1.3K Hispanic household subsample.
