Nielsen Audio reportedly targeting mid-2015 for streaming ratings

nielsenNielsen Audio has reportedly set a target timeframe for introducing streaming audio measurement, according to Inside Radio. The launch target is mid-2015. That timeline was put forth at Nielsen’s Audio Advisory Council meeting in Tampa.

The radio ratings giant, which wholly acquired Arbitron last year, has been preparing, and hinting at, a measurement service for streaming audio to complement its industry-standard AM/FM ratings operation. With consumer listening and advertising monetization of radio content increasingly moving to the digital side of the fence, Nielsen is absent from that part of the business equation. Triton Digital is the market leading specialist in stream measurement, with MRC-accredited ratings that emulate traditional radio metrics.

At RAIN Summit Indy, Jeff Wender spoke on the Big Data panel and responded to a question about the company’s entrance into streaming measurement: “Measuring digital audio is one of our biggest priorities. We built a unique solution, which we believe will offer tremendous additional value to the market.”

That same week, at the NAB Show in Indianapolis, Farshad Family of Nielsen outlined the company’s upcoming system, which will include an opt-in system requiring stations to implement a piece of Nielsen software for census measurement — census measurement tracks actual user streams, compared to survey measurement (such as Nielsen’s PPM devices) which extrapolates ratings from a sample.

At the Audio Advisoty Council meeting Nielsen reportedly said that 30 stations have implemented the software for preliminary data collection.

Brad Hill