NEW YORK—SAG-AFTRA has inked a deal with Nielsen to become its third-party provider of streaming content measurement and has announced that it will use the Nielsen data to enforce the streaming bonus provisions in the 2023 TV/Theatrical Contract the union negotiated last year.
“New business models require new tools, and that’s why we’ve enlisted Nielsen,” said SAG-AFTRA national executive director & chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. “The information they provide will give us the means to cross-check the data streamers give us and ensure employers are fulfilling their contractual obligations to our members.”
More specifically, SAG-AFTRA, which represents more than 160,000 professionals in the media and entertainment industries, will use Nielsen’s Streaming Content Ratings service, which provides audience insights for programs and episodes across streaming platforms, as an objective source of domestic viewership data for original streaming programming, the union said. The data, and the insights gleaned from it, will inform the union’s forecasting and enforcement efforts around the new terms of the streaming bonus provisions of the 2023 TV/Theatrical Contract.
As an independent source of audience measurement insights, Nielsen’s data will complement first-party data from streaming platforms and serve as a consistent and comparable lens through which the performance of streaming titles across various distribution platforms can be analyzed, the union said.
“The rapid evolution of the media landscape and audience behaviors over the past decade has not only affected how content is consumed and measured, but also greatly impacts the financial models on which the entertainment industry operates,” said Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao. “We are incredibly proud that SAG-AFTRA has chosen Nielsen as the source for objective and consistent audience measurement insights in the streaming space.”
