Nielsen and Encoding.com Partner
to Deliver Cross Platform Television Metrics
In partnership with Nielsen, Encoding.com has made an innovative and critical piece of functionality available that will allow broadcast television content to carry its Nielsen tracking data along to smartphone, tablet, and OTT playback. If Nielsen non-audible watermarks are available within source content, Encoding.com can extract and create ID3 tags within HLS content or a static MP4 content prepared for Akamai to segment.
Nielsen is the largest global information and measurement company that delivers consumer behavior insights by monitoring consumption of television programming worldwide. Nielsen connects the dots between what people watch and what people buy. This does two things. First, it measures the audience size for TV programming. In turn broadcasters use this data to place value on advertising. Second, it tracks sales volumes, particularly for consumer packaged goods. The ability to tie viewing habits to spending habits is a powerful combination that the world’s biggest brands pay mightily for. Our focus is on the measurement of audience size.
As TV programming has evolved, and the number of screens people view content on has grown exponentially, it’s created a unique challenge for Nielsen. When there was one way for the world to watch TV it was fairly simple to track audience sizes. It started in the 1950s with a device that was attached to the TV that literally recorded what a sampling of homes across the country were watching. While these homes were watching TV they were also keeping a log of their viewing habits. Nielsens employees then combined the viewer logs and the recorded programming to create the data sets. Some time in 80s they created a people meter for a larger sampling of homes. This was similar to a remote control where you could select who in the household was viewing the programming along with a set-top box that was recording what was being viewed. In the 2000s the number of screens increased well beyond TVs. In 2008 Nielsen started reporting on not only TVs, but also desktop computers and mobile devices (smartphones/tablets). It also began to account for the time shifting that happened with the emergence of Tivos and other DVRs that allowed viewers to automate the recording of content
for later viewing. Unfortunately the evolution of viewing devices didn’t stop there. Connected TVs, OTT devices, and tablets all factor into what has become a fairly complex equation.
Tracking across devices is only one part of what makes the audience tracking landscape so complex. In addition to tracking across screens, rights and clearances are a big problem. Some actors only license their appearances in commercials for traditional TV. In other cases, licensing for songs that appear in commercials are only approved for traditional media, but not for digital media. Most importantly, technical challenges create one of the greatest roadblocks in effective audience measurement. As you can see, things start to get very complex, very quickly.
All of these screens that play video, represent almost as many formats. That’s right, another hurdle for both Nielsen and broadcasters. Fortunately Apple’s HTTP-Live-Streaming (HLS) technology is becoming the accepted standard for most mobile and OTT content delivery. HLS creates multiple MP4 streams at various bitrates and resolutions, broken up into 9 second segments that adjust on the fly depending on the viewing devices available bandwidth screen resolution. In the past, the audio watermarking that Nielsen uses to identify programming on TVs, which is inaudible to humans and embedded in the audio stream, is often blocked by mobile operating systems. This is done to protect users from eavesdropping. In addition, for devices to always be listening for these audible queues would put a serious strain on battery life. In an attempt to solve this, Nielsen has developed encrypted ID3 tags that get embedded directly into HLS streams. This embedding happens in two ways with HLS streams. Those 9 second HLS segments, or Transport Streams (TS) have the ID3 tags embedded in them. Alternatively, the ID3 tags are embedded directly in the MP4 before the segmentation into TS files happens. NBCUniversal was the first to experiment with this during their broadcast of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Between views on their Sports Extra Live App and views on their website, they delivered and tracked almost 25 millions viewers.
Create PCM Water Mark for ID3 Tag
<copy_nielsen_metadata>yes</copy_nielsen_metadata>
<nielsen_breakout_code></nielsen_breakout_code>
<nielsen_distributor_id></nielsen_distributor_id>
Inserting Breakout Code
<copy_nielsen_metadata></copy_nielsen_metadata>
<nielsen_breakout_code>[00,03,07,09(Digital only)]</nielsen_breakout_code>
<nielsen_distributor_id></nielsen_distributor_id>