Ads and audience may have been all the measurement rage over the past few years, helping to foster an emergent crop of vendors supporting the evolving ecosystem in the process. But there’s another aspect key to studios and streamers that has largely gone neglected and been on the backburner in the measurement and analytics space: content.
And more specifically, measurement and data analytics about content consumption across platforms.
There are a host of reasons and multiple use cases as to why and how media studios, cable programmers and streamers need and can benefit from a more comprehensive and transparent view of content consumption and performance throughout the ecosystem - but it won’t necessarily be easy.
There are hurdles, both technical and business-related, to encouraging a competitive vendor environment and to establishing a new collaborative first-party data sharing architecture proposed by CIMM - one that could provide companies with better visibility into not only the performance and consumption of content on their own platforms, but a more complete picture of the viewer journey across platforms.
Although existing solutions like panels and licensed smart TV ACR (automatic content recognition) data provide some level of content consumption measurement across different platforms, each have their own gaps or shortcomings when it comes to factors like scale, representation or title-level visibility.
And while vendors have been incentivized to move forward and innovate on ads measurement products and related currency efforts, there may be less financial motivation for them to do so on the content front. Studios and streamers themselves, too, would need to ease up on business agreements that restrict the capture and reporting of content consumption – something that’s not a given as they typically shield information for competitive purposes.
The topic and these factors were the focus of a strategic review undertaken by the media and agency-backed CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement). The CIMM working group identified use cases for studios and streamer supported by improved content measurement while the report also lays out the vendor landscape and determined challenges and potential solutions amid the existing ecosystem. It prescribes a set of near- and longer-term steps and recommendations for the industry to achieve a more ideal state.
StreamTV Insider exclusively reviewed the full report and spoke with Jon Watts, managing director of CIMM, about the needs and hurdles – and how likely (or unlikely) it is that the industry will collectively rally around said recommendations. Read on for a deeper dive into the drivers, struggles and potential solutions for the content measurement landscape.
The need for a more comprehensive view of content and the viewer journey
For the report, CIMM’s working group defined content measurement – meaning data on consumption of content - as helping programmers “understand who, how and when audiences are consuming video content, by episode and title across all distribution platforms, over time.”
So who wants better content measurement and why?
This type of data is essential to content researchers and executives that have particular sets of needs, according to Watts. That includes to ensure the right content is commissioned or developed, to inform and support windowing and distribution strategies, and for reporting on post-broadcast performance and whether it was adequate or competitive or not. Content measurement also stands to inform decisions related to business develop and monetization, DTC customer acquisition, retention, marketing, and to support external business partners and communications, the report noted, with plenty of applications within each of those buckets.
What do these stakeholders want to know?
To illustrate, Watts used the example of NBCUniversal, which itself is a major studio broadcaster, operates a pay TV service via Comcast, counts linear cable networks (although now in a standalone SpinCo entity) and has its Peacock streaming service. But NBCU also sells and licenses out its content to others.
So in a hypothetical scenario, let’s say NBCU is about to air season five of a hit drama. According to Watts, executives might want to know, is it better to put seasons 1-4 on Peacock and own it exclusively? Would it attract new audiences to put earlier seasons on Netflix or YouTube TV? If NBCU rolls out a FAST channel on Pluto TV with past seasons, would it cannibalize or grow the audience with Peacock?
“All of these kinds of questions are questions that they really want to understand, and critically, they don't want to just understand the performance of their own content. They also want to understand what's happening in the wider market,” Watts told StreamTV Insider.
That last part is key, because while media companies and streamers sit on a trove of their own first-party data, video consumption and content distribution has become widely fragmented. Meaning knowing what’s happening only on their own platform isn’t enough, as companies would benefit from a broader view of what people are watching, where they spend time when not in-app, how they engage with content and shift between services, and the underlying behavioral factors that encourage consumers to move from one service to another - for a full view of the user journey across the video landscape.
To that end, Watts cited two main reasons studios and streamers want a more comprehensive picture. One, they want to know what good looks like. If Peacock viewing on Samsung TVs, for example, is up 30% in the quarter is that good or bad?
“If everyone else is up 50% I just lost share,” Watts noted. ‘”Currently that’s problematic and hard to understand.”
Second, they want to see where viewers are going and watching when they’re not on-platform.
For example, if a channel knows its core audience is 18-34 year-olds that live in southern states and happen to be fans of car racing, but viewing of certain programs on the service has declined – where have those viewers gone?
Historically, this type of information was easier to glean when it was the days of simply broadcast and cable and there were adequate panel-based measurement solutions. However, in 2025 - much like in the effort to improve audience and ads measurement – fragmentation is part of the issue.
“The challenge, of course, is that in a world of many, many, many streaming services, panels alone find it very difficult to provide comprehensive, holistic measurement,” Watts said. “It’s just too fragmented.”
The report prioritized content measurement solutions focused on the viewer journey use case, but content demand analytics is another use case identified by CIMM. It’s one Watts said companies are keen to understand, pointing to vendors like Parrot Analytics that specialize in so-called demand indicators, which could be useful to content acquisition and windowing, among other decisions. Other data collaboration use cases identified include content valuation, discovery, and metadata and schedules.
The vendor landscape
Content measurement stands to help studios and streamers make strategic programming decisions, but currently, there are significant gaps in viewership data at the program and title level – particularly in the streaming space. And as it stands there isn’t a single vendor that has a complete content measurement solution. In part, that’s because the fragmented nature means not one entity has all the data but it’s also due to an apparent lack of financial incentive to build out more robust content measurement products.
As Watts pointed out, the U.S. has been going through a multi-currency revolution over the last handful of years – but noted the keyword there is currency.,
“Many of the new, undoubtedly innovative, high-quality vendors who gain traction and are picking up business and willing support are very much focused on the currency side of the market, that is the ads side of the market,” Watts commented. “In many cases, they don't have content measurement offerings and of course, just like the advertising counterparts, the needs of the content measurement folks have become much more complex.”
Some vendors that have emerged in the audience and ads measurement space include big data players iSpot, VideoAmp, Samba TV, as well as Comscore, and panel-based vendor TVision, which are competing in the space alongside incumbent ratings giant Nielsen.
As to why many have focused on ads rather than content, Watts acknowledged that cost is undoubtedly one of the problems. Vendors contributing to the report also cited economic barriers, noting cost and labor intensity of expanding for both big data ACR fingerprinting and panel sample sizes, where they believe “there is limited ROI” attached to the investment needed.
“There is a limited marketplace of large companies who are prepared to pay multiple vendors for this kind of measurement and analytics solution, and it's a very complex marketplace to piece together solutions,” Watts said. “So to create something really holistic and comprehensive is extraordinarily expensive.”
That said, the CIMM report determined that improving complementary data building blocks and using them together is what will set the foundation for enhancing content measurement. And Watts said almost all studios “are very committed” in knowing that whatever solution they eventually lean into will involve a variety of different vendors, as well as possibly some proprietary investment.
Here’s a chart from the CIMM report of the current content measurement participant landscape - what it dubs CIMMscape:

Current gaps in content viewership data
Although no single vendor has a comprehensive solution there are providers out there delivering a piece of the puzzle, yet gaps remain. And it isn’t just a lack of vendors or cohesion creating hurdles, but the studios and streamers themselves. Because while they’re the ones that arguably stand to benefit most from comprehensive content measurement and analytics, many have historically restricted content data sharing for competitive purposes.
CIMM’s report identified three key requirements for better content measurement: achieving representation, scale, and streaming title visibility.
Here's a chart from CIMM showing the strengths and shortcomings of different data sources that could support content measurement, which the group views as complementary.

While there are multiple factors driving existing gaps in data, Watts zeroed in on two main reasons.
- Do not measure agreements. With these types of agreements, contracts between the likes of Netflix or other big streamers and smart TV OEMs prohibit those OEMs from breaking out the performance of content at a program level. So instead, companies would get something like a ballpark figure of time spent with Netflix.
“But if you're a programming executive within NBCU or Disney or Paramount, or whoever, you need more than that. You need to know more than just time spent. You want to know what programs were doing well on Netflix,” Watts explained.
- Licensed ACR datasets have holes
Automatic content recognition (ACR) technology can detect content and ads on the screen (aka glass-level), and those like Vizio’s Inscape license out data to the industry. But those too have holes, also in part due to app-level agreements about what data can be shared. Also contributing is the challenging task of keeping reference libraries up to date.
According to Watts, up to 20% of content fingerprints taken out of the glass and sent to a reference library for lookup are never recognized. This is because there’s an enormous amount of content available to US consumers – from hundreds of long-tail OTT services, to bounds of videos on YouTube, to hundreds of local channels broadcast in different DMAs, cities and markets – meaning most reference libraries don’t or simply can’t have it all.
Participating vendors that provided perspective for the report pegged economic and technical challenges as two barriers in developing solutions. But here again, business and contractual reasons – usually on the part of the studio or streamer - were called out as impinging on the ability to improve content measurement.
Vendors cited restrictions in their agreements with streaming app owners that prohibit them from reporting content at the title level.
“These agreements play a significant role in content measurement opacity,” the study authors wrote.
For example, many agreements between OEMs and streaming app owners don’t allow for measuring or reporting consumption data for native apps, while MVPDs prohibit viewing breakouts of their subscriber footprints, and some vendors licenses don’t allow the to use data for viewer journeys or content use cases.
On the technical side, vendors suggested streaming app owners should allow metadata identification, permit fingerprinting, allow pixelling and enable access to first- and second-party streaming consumption data.
Potential way forward
Despite the lack of current comprehensive solutions, with clear benefits to be had, CIMM’s study sought to outline some potential solves and a way forward to get to a more ideal state, utilizing multiple complementary data sources.
Streaming-only panels
Its near-term (6-12 months) recommendations are to pair third-party big data sources with panels, including streaming-only panels, where the combination with smart TV/ACR can solve for scale, representation and content visibility, per the report.
According to the study authors, streaming-only panels can fill in big data gaps with the ability to collect and report streaming publishers and titles, unrestricted by agreements with app owners. And title-level consumption data is captured from all devices, including smart TVs, mobile phones and PCs or desktops.
“Streaming Only panels require improvement to be representative, and Smart TV/ACR data requires improvement to capture more streaming, but both in combination hold the promise of solving for near-term content measurement challenges,” wrote the authors.
Another aspect Watts told StreamTV Insider the industry has seen a lot of talk about is a common or shared calibration panel, or a cross-platform content measurement panel of some kind.
As mentioned, a lack of financial incentive is one thing potentially holding vendors back from innovating or expanding on their own products.
Hyphametrics is one measurement company in particular, which has been soliciting funding from customers to roll out a panel that leans less on ACR data and instead uses a router meter and AI-driven tool for content recognition.
“There has been a lot of talk in the industry about whether or not to fund Hyphametrics to support a future rollout of their panel, specifically to support content measurement needs,” he said.
Mid-term (12-18 months), the CIMM review recommends publishers allow expanded ACR collection and reporting.

Federated data collaboration
The longer-term endgame (18-24 months) envisioned by the study authors is the establishment of a framework and architecture through what they dub federated data collaboration.
This is whereby publishers would provide access to first-party streaming data from their owned apps, which the report says would achieve greater streaming measurement accuracy, scale and title-level visibility.
This, however, is not exactly an easy lift.
For one, it would require a system of governance, access rules, privacy, security and technology to enable measurement sourced from first-party data.
According to the report – “the barriers to federated data collaboration are business related and would require new agreements, relationships and operating standards to succeed.”
Here’s the model outlined by CIMM for federated first-party data collaboration:

While the OpenAP-led U.S. Joint Industry Committee (JIC) has already undertaken work on the ads measurement and currency front (and has a streaming-only database in the works), CIMM’s report said that content data collaboration will be more complex than the ad campaign performance work currently being done.
Additionally, compared to ads measurement, there’s potentially less incentive – or alternatively more risk – involved for streamers and studios to collaborate on first-party content data sharing, despite being the would-be beneficiaries.
“The commercial arrangements between ad buyers and publishers incentivize publishers to share their first-party ad impressions data. Content measurement has no such commercial arrangement, and the risk/benefit analysis is more complex when potentially sharing data with a competitor,” the CIMM report determined.
Meaning getting everyone on board is far from a sure thing.
Asked about technical versus business hurdles, Watts suggested it depends on who you ask, with some technical challenges also coming into play. He said many people believe first-party streaming data will play an important role in future measurement solutions, but with hundreds of streaming services out there it’s unclear how technically feasible it would be for all to license their content data to measurement vendors.
“You need robust deduplication,” he noted.
For example, if a vendor gets data from Vizio’s Inscape, Comcast set-top boxes and first-party sports data licensed from Amazon – some of that would overlap and need to be stripped out from other datasets to deduplicate.
“And it turns out that’s actually technically quite difficult to do,” he said, adding that there are also privacy issues one could run into.
For a federated data solution to work “some sort of anonymized ID infrastructure is going to be essential for that kind of service,” Watts noted.
Industry-wide collaboration very unlikely
If a federated data model does come to be, data sharing may only happen among certain and large publishers who choose to strike mutually beneficial collaborative arrangements.
Watts expects some form of data collaboration and licensing among the biggest players, where data cleanrooms play a role for the infrastructure to help alleviate some concerns both on the privacy and competition front.
“[Data clean rooms] limits the need for the publisher to expose their first party data directly to a third party, while allowing for kind of anonymized data aggregation,” he noted.
And in a federated data collaboration approach, various parties could serve their differing needs in terms of controlling how their data is used (for example, publisher A is ok with licensing data to publisher B and C but not D, while publisher B is ok to let agency C and D see their data but not A).
“I think what we are likely to see are collaborative arrangements where different groups of publishers agree to certain use-case-restricted cross-licensing [of first-party data] to support one another,” Watts said.
He expects groups of publishers to agree to provide improved levels of visibility about one another’s service “as kind of a quid pro quo.”
Still, Watts doesn’t see it as an industry-wide kumbaya moment.
“It's very unlikely we're going to see every single party in the marketplace agreeing to license all of their data to literally everybody,” he commented.
And as seen with the JIC currency effort, getting full consensus is difficult. Some major players are not participating in the JIC, most notably Disney on the programmer side and Nielsen on the vendor. Also absent from the JIC are big tech players like Amazon and Google.
As it stands now, CIMM’s study is meant to serve as a diagnostic review of sorts, where Watts said the set of proposals and recommendations are intended to stimulate debate, with various stakeholders reviewing and engaging with CIMM on it this year.
He noted the report went through a lengthy review with stakeholders and now provides potential steps to consider.
“There's lots of stuff we need to think about here, because this is suggesting some very specific collaborative exercises and endeavors that we can undertake to help move things forward,” Watts acknowledged. “But we need time to think this through.”