NEWS13 October 2014
US — Nielsen has admitted that it has been reporting inaccurate ratings for the US broadcast networks for the last seven months.
According to a story in the New York Times, the error benefited ABC – the network saw its ratings improve – while all other networks were affected negatively. In a press release from Nielsen regarding the incorrect attributions, the company linked the issue to a “technical error” that arose in March of this year.
Nielsen claims that the discrepancy in viewing totals was related to “difficult-to-attribute content called ‘all other tuning with code’”, which represents between 0.1% and 0.25% of the viewing totals. The company says it has deployed a software fix to address the problem and will reprocess all impacted data going back to August 18, to be reissued by the end of this month.