Television audience measurement: proposals of the industry in the era of digitalization

Abstract

The arrival of digitalization has modi ­ fied television consumption. Audiovisual content can still be enjoyed live via tele ­ vision sets but now we can also watch it on the screens of other devices such as computers, tablets or mobile phones. It can also be watched at the time the viewer prefers, being recorded in digi ­ tal devices or accessed via the Internet. Thus, advertisers and broadcasters re ­ quire audience data regardless of the type of screen or the time of consump ­ tion and the audience measurement in ­ dustry needs to meet this requirement with new proposals. In this paper, we comment on the main challenges faced by the traditional te ­ levision audience measurement (TAM) systems due to digitalization. We review recent academic and professional con ­ tributions that show how television con ­ sumption is changing and how these changes affect audience measurement. Once the challenges are presented, we revise the requirements of the adver­ tising market participants and how the most important TAM companies are responding. Our purpose is to analyse the adequacy of the research industry proposals and try to summarise the main characteristics that the best au ­ dience measurement systems should offer in the new television consumption landscape.