One of the biggest things in TV are ratings. Ratings in TV are what make or break a show. Higher the rating the more people are watching meaning more money and more advertising will come from the show. Ratings are figured by a company called Nielsen which has been around for a long time. One of the biggest issues with ratings though is that as more and more advances come to the internet, more people are getting their favorite TV programming on the web compared to watching it on TV. Now this problem effects the ratings systems because when a show is watched on a site like Hulu, Nielsen is unable to measure how many people are actually watching the show.
With the sign that the digital age isn’t going to stop growing Nielsen announced that they will now add people who stream shows from the internet to be part of their ratings system. Not every show will be part of the ratings though said Nielsen. Shows that are streamed and have different commercials compared to when the show was shown on TV will be put into a different data pull. So shows that are streamed that have the same commercials will be included in the regular TV ratings. Another thing that Nielsen said they would start doing would be tracking tweets about shows and also how many people read those tweets. This info will be put into a new rating system that is based off of social media. These improvements will allow people to know true TV ratings now.