Nielsen Now Knows When You Are Streaming

On Thursday, the firm reported that 64 percent of the time American viewers used their television sets in May 2021 was spent watching network and cable TV, while they watched streaming services about 26 percent of the time.

A Nielsen spokesman said that the firm anticipates the streaming share could go up to about 33 percent by the end of the year.

It comes in addition to its previous method of measuring how many people are watching streaming platforms, which relies on audio-recognition software included in Nielsen devices that are now in 38,000 households across the country.

For The Gauge’s streaming stats, Nielsen measured about 14,000 households through a piece of hardware that observes internet traffic that passes through a router.

Nielsen, he said, “used to not be very sophisticated or accurate in terms of internet viewing.

David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery who is in line to lead a media giant if its merger with WarnerMedia is cleared by regulators, called Nielsen’s reporting methods “antiquated” last month.

Late last year, for instance, the company said that “Bridgerton,” the romance series from the super-producer Shonda Rhimes, was the most-watched original series in its history.

David Kenny, the Nielsen chief executive and the former president of Akamai, a cloud computing company, has known Mr. Hastings more than a decade.

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