Generating perhaps what is the first piece of notable data since Nielsen agreed to measure audience usage on Roku in April, the research company found that 27 percent of viewing on the OTT platform is done by more than one audience member.
This is, of course, counter-intuitive to the notion that streaming video consumption is very much a solo act.
As Nielsen noted in a press release touting the benchmark, this data might have more than a theoretical impact, since the early assumption in digital video ad sales is that each stream is targeted to only one viewer. On the living-room centric Roku, marketers could be shorting programmers on impressions by about a third.
In fact, Nielsen said "co-viewing is even higher for certain program genres -- 38 percent for kids content, and 28 percent for sports."
"Nielsen's co-viewing measurement and insights gives marketers who serve ads on the Roku platform actionable data to better understand their collective TV audience and identify where they are potentially missing out on audience impressions," said Megan Clarken, executive VP of global watch product leadership at Nielsen. "Considering the trend in over-the-top video consumption, it's essential for both advertisers and channel publishers to be able to rely and transact on metrics that tell the whole Total Audience story."
Nielsen's Roku study came as the platform added two key TV Everywhere services, Watch ABC and Watch ABC Family. The Watch ABC app enables live streams of local ABC stations, but only in eight markets with ABC owned-and-operated stations -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Houston, Fresno and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
For more:
- see this Roku post
- read this Nielsen announcement
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