Digital Audience and Streaming

Some broadcasters and event organisers stream event coverage online. Online coverage can either be dedicated event coverage, or other social media or videoplatforms such as YouTube. This section refers to dedicated event coverage that is similar to the content available on television.

At present there is not the same level of measurement development from the industry as a whole, although there are attempts being made in many countries to measure the total audience across TV and online platforms. Currently the combined measurement techniques are not widely available and there is (as yet) no consistent approach from market to market. However, as the systems being developed involve a digital process, they are likely to be able to generate data that appears in a similar fashion to TV audience metrics. In some cases this can be split between live streaming and video on demand. In other cases it will relate to a single broadcast and include all types of access. Data is dependent on what is available from the data analytics that broadcaster sites have in place and could include:

• Average audience (as per TV) - a programme audience is the average of all the minute audiences covered by the programme transmission.

• Number of accesses - the total number of people that have accessed any part of the content – content being a broadcast or set of broadcasts.

• Unique views or visitors - refers to the number of different people who access the video content. This is closest to TV reach as it counts people once regardless of number of visits according to (for example): IP address; cookies; or their member name (if the particular site uses membership).

• Peak concurrent views - the highest number of viewers at any one time during the broadcast.

Whilst standardised cross media measurement doesn’t yet exist, unique views across the total event programming would provide a metric that is closest to TV reach. In the UK, BARB is testing new techniques amongst its TV Panel which combine traditional television monitoring with digital streaming and consumption of programming on mobile devices and on-demand in order to arrive at a consolidated measure of the viewing audience1.

¹ http://www.barb.co.uk/resources/barb-facts/how-we-do-what-we-do