CBS, Nielsen Start Year Without Deal

CBS, which distributes some of TV’s most-watched programs, may have to use a new way to count its viewers, reports Variety.

CBS and the media-measurement service Nielsen are without a contract after their current deal lapsed at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Talks are likely to continue. But CBS is determined to secure a pact that it feels makes the best economic sense for the company while Nielsen believes the network will find negotiating with advertisers more difficult if it does not have access to its measures of audience viewing, these people said.

CBS has been weighing dropping Nielsen and instead using its own data as well as measurement information from Comscore, a Nielsen rival, to do deals with advertisers.

At issue is a long-running complaint from TV networks that Nielsen isn’t measuring the many different audiences for their programming as well as it should. As smartphones, mobile tablets and broadband-connected TV’s gain more consumer acceptance, audiences are increasingly able to stream their TV favorites in on-demand fashion, making the task of counting them exponentially more difficult. TV networks have long based their advertising rates on Nielsen’s measure of linear TV audiences, which have slipped as consumers embrace Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming and on-demand options. In such an environment, TV networks believe Nielsen’s overnight ratings are no longer are not longer the critical yardstick of viewership they once were.