It’s a significant day in our little TV biz. Today for the first time TV viewing outside the home will be fully integrated into Nielsen’s national TV ratings.
This is a big deal for sports. Basically from the day I started at Fox the two things that were often talked about as potential game-changers for sports TV were legal gambling and out-of-home ratings. Now they’re both here.
Sports already dominates any ranking of TV’s most-watched shows. With the inclusion of out-of-home, how much more will sports control the high end of the TV marketplace?
How will news and business networks, already soaring during the pandemic, grow with OOH? What time periods will suddenly become more attractive for sports events? Which sports will benefit most? A lot of interesting questions will be answered this year.
We know from preliminary data that the OOH sports audience is younger, more female and more diverse than the in-home audience. Will that change how sports are valued? We’re already seeing huge impact to local MLB viewing among young people.
Credit is due to @Nielsen for seeing this through after years of development and very vigorous debate among their clients. Their job, and it’s a hard one, is to provide the most complete measurement possible and let the marketplace negotiate its value, and they’ve done it.
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