It’s all Nielsen’s fault. Yeppers. Cuz everything bad in the realm of TV is Nielsen’s fault. Yeppers.
by Karl Bode
For years, we’ve noted how popular TV ratings firm Nielsen has turned a bit of a blind eye to cord cutting and the Internet video revolution, on one hand declaring that the idea of cord cutting was “pure fiction,” while on the other hand admitting it wasn’t actually bothering to track TV viewing on mobile devices. It’s not surprising; Nielsen’s bread and butter is paid for by traditional cable executives, and really — who wants to take the time to pull all those collective heads of out of the sand to inform them that their precious pay TV cash cow is dying?
Now that Nielsen has decided to join us in 2015 and start tracking streaming service and mobile device viewing, the numbers, shockingly, aren’t looking all that hot. Nielsen’s latest analysis shows a number of things, most notably a decline in pay TV subscribers but a sharp uptick in users who are only subscribing to broadband: