Push for big data escalates as viewers tune out of traditional TV

How many people watch TV shows? Is that number going up or down? For broadcasters, those are almost existential questions -- but ones to which, in the age of tablets and YouTube, they no longer have an accurate answer. European countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden, are leading the way in finding new ways to count TV viewers. Broadcasters hope that doing a better job of tracking people’s habits will help to protect billions of pounds in ad revenues. According to traditional gauges, audiences are falling in some key markets: viewing fell by 3 percent in the US and 5 percent in the UK in 2014.

But those ratings -- which are used by broadcasters when they commission programmes, and advertisers when they allocate spending -- do not include the boom in viewing of TV programmes on desktops, laptops, tablets and mobiles. “We have clicks on the Internet and viewers on the television -- how do you connect these different things?” asks an ad sales executive at one major broadcaster. Many European TV companies and advertisers want a “single currency” that measures how many people have watched a certain advert, whether on broadcast TV or online.