The media ecosystem is changing—70.6% of US homes with TVs have a smart TV, up from 62.3% two years ago, according to Nielsen's National TV Panel as of October 2023. With widespread connected TV adoption and increasing high-speed internet availability, new ways of watching media have introduced new and bigger data sets.

At Nielsen, we have invested a decade-worth of research in integrating big data sets into our methodologies in innovative ways that also ensure continuity with our currency measurement. For the 2024–2025 TV season in the US, we have enhanced our Big Data + Panel stream to include Comcast data, in addition to DISH, DirecTV, Roku, and Vizio.

Both our Big Data + Panel and National TV Panel measurement data will be available for the upcoming TV season. And with two views of the US audience for every Nielsen-measured telecast in 2023, we inevitably see some differences. Whenever a measurement sample changes, audience estimates will also change. Larger sample sizes facilitate more comprehensive measurement. To help the industry better plan and negotiate around this year’s TV season with Big Data + Panel, we’ve compared average overall TV usage for the past year.

How does total TV usage change?

With Big Data + Panel, the total US households using TV in 2023 increased slightly across most age groups compared with National TV Panel data alone.

When we break TV usage out by race and ethnicity, we see similar trends. The number of Hispanic and Black households using TV also generally increased across each age group with Big Data + Panel.

With 45 million Big Data households and 75 million devices, our Big Data + Panel approach expands coverage and scale. Greater coverage and scale allow for the measurement of even more people and programs. For both media buyers and sellers, this opens up more opportunities to understand and engage with viewers. Audiences today are eager to see themselves in TV content and ads, especially Black and Hispanic audiences. Understanding reach across segments can help you connect audiences with the right content and ads.

While Big Data brings scale, combining it with our National TV Panel data plays a key role in unlocking these audience insights. Our gold-standard panel of approximately 42,000 US homes, which includes more than 101,000 real people, allows media buyers and sellers to go beyond households to understand the people consuming media. They’re able to ask deeper questions, such as: Who lives in the home?; How old are they?; What race and ethnicity do they identify as?; and Who is watching the TV at a given point in time? As a result, our Big Data + Panel data stream is able to provide demographic, geographic, and over-the-air and broadband-only household information, as well as out-of-home viewing insights.

For publishers, the increased granularity of the Big Data + Panel data stream means more of the national TV inventory is monetizable: increasing from 88.0% to 99.9%. For advertisers and agencies, that means more opportunities to connect with audiences. By marrying the scale of Big Data with person-level information from our National TV Panel, we’re able to provide more advanced targeting to unlock the ability to capitalize on linear addressable capabilities, as well as advanced audience segments.

To learn more about how Nielsen is moving audience measurement forward, explore Nielsen ONE.