Pilot partners include Fox, NBC, ABC, Univision, Discovery and A+E. AOL is the only digital video company participating in the pilot; Hulu and YouTube aren’t participating yet. The tool will open up to others this fall.

The tool can’t be used yet to track viewing on mobile devices, though Nielsen said that capability is coming, and because it does not include many online sites, it can’t give advertisers and networks a full view of how viewers are watching TV online.

Nielsen also announced in February that it plans to add cord cutters to the households whose TV watching habits it tracks.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

The Nielsen news was first reported on Wednesday by The Hollywood Reporter, which said that by September 2013 “Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples.” Nielsen confirmed the news on Thursday, with Nielsen SVP Pat McDonough telling the New York Times that the company’s definition of “television household” will now include “those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set.” According to the AP:

“This will add roughly 160 homes to Nielsen’s current sample of 23,000 houses nationwide with meters monitoring viewing habits.

More significantly, Nielsen will return to its sample to find homes that have cable or broadcast, but also separate TV sets hooked up through broadband. This will add an estimated 2,000 more broadband sets, significantly increasing the sample size.”

The company is also working on ways to track viewing on smartphones and tablets.

Separately, Billboard has begun including official YouTube music video views (from the U.S.) in its rankings. “All official videos on YouTube, including user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio, will now factor into how a song’s popularity is determined,” YouTube said on its blog. Billboard’s charts have included digital download and streaming data, tracked by Nielsen, since last year.

As Eliza Kern described in her post on the rumors, Bluefin’s technology allows broadcasters — and more importantly, brands — to see where and when their content is being discussed on social networks and elsewhere on the web. The company was founded by MIT scientist Deb Roy, who began by collecting every sound his young son made during a 3-year period and then used algorithms to detect patterns in that data (Bluefin’s CEO will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Television is where the money is

Twitter’s decision to concentrate on TV-related features and partnerships isn’t that surprising. As we’ve described before, the company has been coming under increasing pressure to generate meaningful amounts of revenue in order to justify a market value that is estimated to be in the $10 billion range, based on recent sales of its shares on the private market. And while Twitter has been building up its “promoted tweets” and other advertising-related features, the most obvious and lucrative source of revenue is still television and other video-related content.

Twitter's true strategy? If they are 2nd screen for TV, and take over TV audience measurement, they control both social and TV advertising?

—
Nova Spivack (@novaspivack) February 05, 2013

Twitter’s moves in this direction started with partnerships for specific events like the Academy Awards, where it helped broadcasters filter and aggregate tweets about the content, and then expanded with deals related to things like NASCAR and the Summer Olympics, where the company created customized portals or hubs and had its own staff of editors curating content related to the event. After the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media partnerships bragged about how much traffic the service drove to NBC’s programming, and it’s clear the company wants more of those kinds of relationships.

Even the launch of Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter recently acquired, can be seen as another extension of this focus: while most people have been using the app to share short clips of their cats and other ephemera, there have already been advertisers and brands taking advantage of the new format — including The Gap — and it’s easy to see how those clips could become mini-advertisements.

Our 2nd @vineapp experiment: stop motion 1969 denim. What should we #Vine next? vine.co/v/bJ6QQYKuDgz

—
  (@Gap) January 28, 2013

It’s not just a desire for revenue that has driven Twitter into the arms of television, however. As Eliza noted in a post about the use of Twitter during the Super Bowl, the fact that the network works as a “second screen” for such events has been obvious for some time — and it makes sense for Twitter to capitalize on that in whatever ways it can. And as Peter Kafka pointed out at All Things Digital, adding analytics to its video-related partnerships via Bluefin would allow Twitter to make a better case for why brands should care (it also has a partnership with Nielsen).

Twitter should be about much more than just TV

So what’s wrong with Twitter getting into bed with NBC and other broadcasters, or becoming a handmaiden to traditional television? A couple of potential pitfalls showed themselves during the Olympics: one was the fact that Twitter’s content hub was unavailable to non-U.S. users because of geographic restrictions that its partner NBC was subject to. By now, we’ve grown used to Twitter content being unrestricted — except in special cases such as Germany’s request to remove Nazi tweets, when changes have to be made for legal reasons. A geo-gated Twitter just seems wrong.

Acq of Bluefin Labs by Twitter feels like their equivalent of the "offline cookie" - how to close the loop w advertisers re: effectiveness

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) February 05, 2013

The other incident that occurred during the Olympics was Twitter’s decision to shut down a journalist’s account after he criticized an executive at NBC and posted what the company said was a private email address. Twitter later admitted that this was mis-handled, but it raised the question of whose interests the company would be likely to protect if push came to shove: will the needs of broadcast partners take precedence over the needs of users? In some ways, they already have.

For me at least, getting into bed with television broadcasters and defining success as driving traffic to their programs is not as interesting a use of a global, real-time information platform as something like the “networked journalism” we saw during the Arab Spring and other events. Obviously, Twitter can still do things to help encourage that kind of activity as well, but if it doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as a TV deal, how much attention will it get? Not much.

I am as much a fan of discussing shows like the Super Bowl on Twitter as anyone, but I don’t really need another way to find out about the latest NBC sitcom or reality show. I would much rather Twitter focused on filtering and curating the broader universe of discussion around important issues than boosting the viewership numbers of The Biggest Loser. Unfortunately, that’s where the money is.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K

In fact, belying several earlier research studies, which said growth of U.S. multi-channel services has slowed significantly but not stopped, Nielsen’s latest “Cross-Platform Report” says the number of U.S. homes paying a multichannel provider for TV services last year actually declined by 1.5 million, or about 1.5 percent.

Subscription gains made by telco providers AT&T and Verizon (about 1.1 million) and satellite service companies DirecTV and Dish (added 280,000 subscribers) could not offset the over 2.9 million subscriptions lost by cable providers, Nielsen reports (see chart).

Other nuggets from Nielsen’s quarterly “Cross-Platform” report:

– After years of growth, the average amount of time per month the typical viewer spent watching traditional TV in the fourth quarter declined by about 46 minutes, or one half of one percent. Nielsen says most of that shift is caused by DVR usage, which was up 12.3 percent year over year, but viewing of internet video (up 4.2 per) is also beginning to factor in.

– Amount of time spent on game consoles in the U.S. was up 30 percent year over year in the fourth quarter. These consoles can now be found in 45 percent of American homes, Nielsen says.

– Among kids 2-11, time-shifted viewing grew about 20 percent over the fourth quarter of 2010, with young audiences embracing DVR usage and on-demand viewing on game consoles.

The two platforms have been gaining users in a crucial period of growth for smartphones as it picks up early adopters: penetration in the U.S. now stands at 44 percent, more than double the 18 percent penetration in Q3 2010. That still means that there is still more than half the market to play for — an opportunity companies like Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) hope to catch.

Nielsen, which today publishes its latest State of the Media report, notes apps have remained a popular source of mobile content, with the number of smartphone users downloading apps now at 62 percent. That population is largely concentrated on the two leading platforms, which together account for 83 percent of all app downloads.

The growth on iOS and Android, combined with the declines on other platforms, point to how app ecosystems appear to be coalescing around the dominant players:

– On Android, 49 percent of smartphone owners have downloaded apps, a massive rise on the four percent that had done so in 2009.

– Apple has the second-strongest platform friendly for apps, with 34 percent. But that is actually a slight decline on 2009, when 37 percent of iOS owners downloaded an app.

– But when it comes to other platforms, the percentages of users downloading (and presumably using) apps has actually gone down. Eleven percent of BlackBerry users have downloaded apps, down from 32 percent in 2009. And only three percent of Windows Mobile users have downloaded apps, compared to 18 percent in 2009. The WebOS platform has seen a decline to one percent from five percent, while Symbian remained level at one percent in both years.

What would have been interesting to see is how Windows Phone users rank in terms of app downloads today. Microsoft has made a huge effort to court developers to make apps for the platform and it has seen rapid growth in terms of the number of apps in its Marketplace catalog. But the platform and its app store were not around in 2009, so that may be why Nielsen chose not to include it.

Taken together there are around one million apps on the market today, but the vast majority of those are on Apple’s iOS and Android, which both claim around half a million apps each. Microsoft’s Marketplace annouced 40,000 apps in November 2011.

Overall, content is still weighted to mobile internet, not apps. Although apps downloads are growing, they remain less popular than plain old mobile internet usage, according to Nielsen’s figures. The amount of consumers accessing mobile internet sites in Q3 was 57 million, while app downloads (and again, presumably usage as well) were at 49 million across all smartphone platforms. On individual platforms, like Android, apps are actually more popular than mobile web:

Nielsen notes that games have been the most-downloaded type of app in the last 30 days, and indeed, game downloads overall have grown the most of all “rich media” uses on mobile devices, rising 83 percent versus Q3 2010. That still only works out to 35 million of all smartphone subscribers downloading games, which points to how those who are into games tend to be engaged and probably repeat users.

The other gaming category charted by Nielsen, online game playing, grew the most of any category, at 95 percent, but it is also the smallest, with 16 million of all users engaging in online gaming.

Mobile video, still seen as a great opportunity by content players, is still not seeing huge use compared to other types of content: 31 million people used mobile video in Q3 2011.

Mobile music services have been a particular focus in the last few months, with the launch of Spotify in the U.S., Apple rolling out new features for iTunes and totally new companies like Rara.com wading into the waters — among many other developments. Although it’s still early days for streaming services — there are only about five million people paying for digital music of any form today on mobiles, according to figures from Omnifone and Loudeye — music streaming is more popular than downloads, at 29 million versus 18 million of all consumers using the services; and both are growing very fast, at 66 and 65 percent, respectively. If you combine the two kinds of music offerings, it works out to 47 million of all users engaging in mobile music services, nearly as many as downloading apps of any kind.

International. Nielsen’s monthly reports usually focus on what is happening in the U.S. market — and that’s the case here, too, but this time around Nielsen has also included some comparative figures from other markets. Among them:

– In one graphic charting notable mobile usage in different markets, Nielsen points out that the UK has smartphone penetration of 38 percent, a fair bit lower than 46 percent figure announced by UK regulator Ofcom yesterday but still among the leaders world-wide.

– Argentina has the highest smartphone and multimedia phone penetration in Latin America, at 60 percent.

Nielsen’s survey is based on device metering data from “thousands” of consumers; detailed, monthly analysis of bills for 65,000 mobile customers in the U.S.; and surveys covering around 300,000 consumers each year.

Perhaps given the recent wave of interest in privacy issues around companies like Carrier IQ (who once ran a trial with Nielsen) and how data is mined by companies for research and other purposes, Nielsen makes the point of noting that all its data is volunteer-, opt-in based.

As you can see from the table below, the Android Market itself is the most popular app on the platform among Android consumers in the U.S. using apps in the past 30 days — a pretty obvious conclusion, given that it’s a measurement of app usage and it is the most popular route to download apps on Android in the U.S. today.

But it’s also indicative of how popular Facebook is in all age groups that it ranks as number two in all of the categories after the Market app itself, with between 77 percent and 81 percent reach among all users.

It shows (if you needed one more example) that there are already a lot of people using Android-based devices quite a lot with Facebook — which could prove to be a challenge for Facebook if it does launch its fabled phone in partnership with HTC. That device will need to be offering users something substantially beyond what they’re already able to do if the companies hope to sell the idea.

After Facebook, it’s the four most-popular apps made by Google itself — Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search and YouTube — appearing in different orders depending on the age bracket. And then, we have pretty much the same selection of apps for each group — again with the order changing depending on the ages in question.

According to Nielsen’s numbers, the percentage of phones now in the market that are smartphones stands at 43 percent — compared to 40 percent in Q2. Coincidentally, those are the same percentages for Android within the smartphone market. Android, the most-common platform, now has a 43 percent penetration in the U.S. market, compared to 40 percent the quarter before.

As we have seen in other reports on Q3, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) did not see any growth. According to Nielsen, its marketshare in the remained steady at 28 percent. That still makes Apple the biggest manufacturer of them all, since Android devices are made by a number of OEMs.

(Figures from other analyst houses such as Strategy Analytics and Kantar Worldpanel have noted that HTC has shipped the most Android devices in the last quarter. Nielsen does not break out which Android device maker has the highest penetration to date.)

As with Apple, Windows Phone saw no change in its marketshare, which stood at seven percent, while RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) declined slightly to 18 percent compared to 19 percent the quarter before.

Breaking out some figures on how smartphones are selling among different age groups, the 25-34 age group is providing to be the most smartphone-friendly at the moment, with a penetration of 62 percent for smartphone ownership.

Those aged between 18 and 24 are second in the rankings, with smartphone penetration of 54 percent.

One opportunity for carriers and OEMs could be in targeting so-called “silver surfers.” Only 18 percent of consumers aged over 64 years old are using smartphones, significantly below the average penetration of 43 percent. Given how many innovations there are on devices today to make use easier — from voice-commands to swyping gestures to type — it’s a surprise that we haven’t seen more marketing targeting this group already.

One number was a little higher than expected: over half of those in the U.S. buying a smartphone over the last three months chose an Android phone, and a similar percentage (58 percent) chose a smartphone over a feature phone, according to Nielsen. Given that the iPhone 4 is getting long in the tooth and savvy phone shoppers know that an iPhone 5 is around the corner, it’s not that surprising that Android had a strong quarter, but that’s still an impressive number.

The smartphone market “is out of the early adopter phase and moving into the mainstream,” said Jonathan Carson, general manager of digital for Nielsen, in presenting the new research Monday at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference.

Android phones are capturing a lot of those new users with promotional giveaways and strong pricing discounts. But with Apple expected to launch the new iPhone 5 in time for the holiday season, those number s could change.

– The most active social media users are influential offline as well. They’re 26 percent more likely to voice their opinion on politics and current events, 30 percent more likely to give their opinion on TV shows and 5 percent more likely to go on a date.

– Females and 18-34 year olds are the most active social networkers. These active users are most often Asian or Pacific Islander, live in New England, have a bachelor’s degree and a household income of under $50,000 per year.

– Social networking and app usage is up 30 percent. 40 percent of mobile users actively use mobile for social interactions. After GPS, social media capability is the most valued function on a smartphone.

– Facebook is by far, the most popular social destination. Tumblr has also seen strong growth, nearly tripling in the past year alone.

– Social networkers want to help each other. 60 percent want to give product improvement recommendations. 64 percent want to customize products.

Lots more data, including on what social media is used for, in Subramanyam’s presentation:

Nielsen: The State Of Social Media 2011



Follow paidContent Advertising via our live stream and via Twitter, hashtag #pcads11.

The Android users who agreed to participate in a Nielsen project monitoring their smartphone activity spent an average of 56 minutes a day accessing either the mobile Web or applications on their phones, but vastly preferred the apps according to the data. That application usage was also concentrated among the most popular applications on the platform as a whole, with the top 50 applications for Android representing 61 percent of the panel’s app usage.

Unfortunately Nielsen is not ready to release comparable data for iPhone users, which might make for interesting data for those developing apps and targeting mobile platforms. But it does show that people have been trained to think of apps as their mobile gateway to the Internet, even on Android, a platform which tends to get second billing among application developers.

Android doesn’t have the restrictions on in-app subscription behavior that has led some publishers to push their mobile Web sites over their apps, so this trend may not be worrying for that group. However, if similar numbers are in play for iOS users (if anything, I’d estimate higher app usage) it could be a problem for those trying to build mobile experiences outside of the app walls.