The Nielsen ratings firm is rolling out a brand new tool that is geared towards allowing them to measure the number of viewers who are watching online shows.
The company, which has long been the standard bearer when it comes to television ratings has slowly but surely been moving to a more high tech approach to their measurements.
Earlier this year the firm announced that it was making changes to the way it measured broadband usage that would make it more accurate and dependable.
The company has also branched out to the point where it can now tell the american consumer how many of them are Android users compared to other brands of smartphones.
The Nielsen tool for online television viewing might be the first step towards the major cable companies embracing people “cutting the cord.”
That is the name given to the practice of people no longer watching cable TV but getting all their programming online.
Companies have been resistant to that approach on a large scale because they haven’t had a dependable way to measure who is watching what on the Internet.
The new tool will allow TV networks to measure who is watching what on their personal websites but tweaks are needed to get more in depth than that.
There is a caveat that the tool isn’t yet ready for wide spread use. The company has said that this is a pilot program and that the tool still can’t measure traffic on a site like Hulu or Netflix.
That is still a major problem for television networks who are losing eyes to those services. Netflix especially has a ton of programs on their website and plenty of people have turned to the site where you only have to pay a little more than $8 per month.
For some, that is a savings of more than $100 per month compared to what they pay for broadcast television.
What do you think about Nielsen’s new online TV ratings tool?
