Nine's first cross-device measurement tool findings have been unveiled – with the network releasing insights into how viewers watched it's reality show Married at First Sight.
Not content on waiting for OzTAM's pending cross-platform measurement tool, Nine ploughed ahead with its own version.
It has now released its first set of what it calls 'platform agnostic ratings for content' (PARC) numbers, meaning how many people watched live, on repeat within seven days, on playback, or via its online catch-up platform 9JumpIn.
It found an average of 75% of people soaking up the show were watching it live, with the remaining 25% watching via other means.
Nine is attempting to sell PARC figures in the market as a way to provide a total holistic measure for a program, and then attempting to package up sales.
Director for television at Nine, Michael Healy, said that the new figures showed that free-to-air TV was alive and well, it just wasn't necessarily reflected in overnight figures.
“These figures show beyond doubt that free-to-air television is alive and well. We have known for some time the audience is choosing to view content in a multitude of ways,” Healy said.
“Overnight viewing figures only tell part of the story.”
It found that 2.13 million people tuned in on average during the six episode run of the show, with an average national overnight audience of 1.6 million people.
An additional 376,000 chose to watch the program in encore presentations of the program, with time-shifted viewing accounting for 5% of the total.
Online catch-up via the 9JumpIn platform accounted for 61,000 viewers, or 3% of the total viewing audience.
The network has jumped in ahead of OzTAM to measure its own online catch-up audience, measuring streams on a per minute average rather that at stream start.
The rationale for doing so was that a measurement by live stream start could be 100,000, but the average audience could only end up being 30,000 after people stopped watching and did other things.
Taking a minute by minute average also enabled Nine to provide a measurement which mirrored OzTAM broadcast measurement, making it somewhat of a common methodology.
OzTAM is currently testing a common metric for catch up which it hopes will make it easier to measure audiences across devices in a common fashion, enabling networks to sell numbers across device.
Nine has previously said that it would switch to OzTAM's piece when it was released, but keep the PARC measurement tool intact.
Nine's research director, Steve Weaver, backed up Healy's sentiment.
“More and more, our clients are asking for data that completes the picture of how audiences are consuming our product, beyond the live broadcast on Nine,” Weaver said.
“The current system of reporting overnight data at 9am each day, while still important, is increasingly only a part of the total audience picture.”
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