Nielsen Will Use Super Bowl to Test New Measurement of Live Crowds

TV networks and sports leagues rely heavily on Nielsen to to tell them how many people at home watch football games, tennis matches and auto races. Counting viewers in bars, hotels and offices? That has sometimes created a bone of contention.

The measurement giant says it will use NBC’s telecast of Super Bowl LX on February 8 to kick off use of a new methodology — arming Nielsen panelists with wearable devices that capture audio from content being watched — that it believes will more accurately reflect audiences engaged in what is known in the industry as “co-viewing,” or watching a video screen along with many other people. The hope is that the new technology will help Nielsen’s ratings better reflect the total number of people watching a program, especially live events.

Nielsen says the new methodology will be put to use during Super Bowl LX on NBC on Sunday, and then continue during what it calls “high-profile sports and entertainment live events” in the first half of 2026.

“Nielsen’s mission is to constantly push measurement forward and deliver the most accurate data ever. This co-viewing pilot builds on that mission, alongside our recent enhancements with Big Data + Panel, out of home expansion, live streaming measurement and our wearable devices,” said Karthik Rao, Nielsen’s CEO, in a statement. “Our clients produce live TV events that get the world watching. It’s our job to make sure we are accurately counting the audiences they meticulously build.”

Live events, mostly those created around sports, represent traditional media’s last hope in the age of streaming. Only sports and live spectacles built around such things as the 50th anniversary of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” or a recent Netflix special during which daredevil Alex Honnold climbed the tallest building in Taiwan remain able to lure the type of large set of simultaneous viewers that advertisers desperately need.

Nielsen and the TV networks haven’t always been on the same page when it comes to tabulating crowds at bars, parties and other outside-the-living-room venues. In 2023, the NFL discovered Nielsen had made errors in the way it counted viewership of Super Bowl LVIII on the NFL Network as well as audiences watching the Big Game out of home. Nielsen had in fact undercounted the total audience for the event by two million. In 2020, several media conglomerates, including Fox, Walt Disney Co. and the media company now known as Paramount Skydance, were outraged by a preliminary Nielsen decision to shelve a new way of counting out-of-home viewing that was expected to unearth more viewers for sports and news. Nielsen reversed itself and put the new technology into practice.

Some companies have tried to boost out-of-home measurement on their own. Disney’s ESPN in 2017 began offering a total live audience number that combined both linear and streaming viewership, as well as a then-nascent measure of out of home crowds from Nielsen.

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