Nielsen is rolling out a new service designed to measure viewership of subscription VOD services, and is starting with Netflix—a company that’s been notoriously secretive about its data.

Nielsen’s SVOD Content Ratings service will provide data similar to what Nielsen already provides for linear TV, including ratings, reach, frequency, age and gender, with metrics broken out by both seasons and episodes, as part of its Total Audience strategy that attempts to measure viewership across all platforms and devices.

“The reason we’re focusing on Netflix is they are the predominant SVOD provider in the marketplace—the SVOD that our clients have been asking us to provide transparency and measurement of for some time,” Megan Clarken, president of Nielsen’s media measurement division Watch, told The Wall Street Journal.

Nielsen plans to add other streaming providers such as Hulu and Amazon in 2018.

Netflix has long been averse to divulging ratings, saying the data is irrelevant since it doesn’t sell advertising, and claims Nielsen’s metrics are wrong.

“The data that Nielsen is reporting is not accurate, not even close, and does not reflect the viewing of these shows on Netflix,” the streamer said to WSJ in a statement.

So far, eight companies have signed up for the SVOD tracking service, including A+E Networks, Disney/ABC, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros.

The much-coveted data is designed to offer studios and content creators insight into how Netflix and other SVOD services impact ratings on linear networks, and can potentially be used to influence business decisions such as licensing negotiations, audience targeting strategies and content distribution.

Earlier this week, Netflix revealed a surge in customer growth that went beyond the company’s own expectations as it added 5.3 million new subscribers, bringing its total subscriber base to about 104 million across the globe. The streamer has also announced plans to spend up to $8 billion on content next year.

Nielsen says its syndicated service will at first only be able to measure Netflix shows on connected TV devices such as Roku, Apple TV, smart TVs and video game consoles, which accounts for about 75 percent of SVOD viewing, according to Adweek. It will not factor in mobile devices for the time being.

The information available through SVOD Content Ratings won’t be immediate. It’s “definitely not an overnight process,” Furher said. Although it could take as long as three weeks to process the data, it stems from a client desire for information that’s “accurate and complete rather than rushed,” as Adweek puts it.

Nielsen is also slowly building up its library of Netflix content, and won’t track everything right away. The company is focusing on movies, Netflix originals and previous seasons.

Nielsen’s measurement system works by using digital watermarks on content to create video signatures that are put into a ratings engine in Nielsen’s national panel of 44,000 households and more than 100,000 people.

In the past Netflix has thwarted Nielsen’s ability to track its shows by stripping the digital watermarks from its content. But the SVOD Content Ratings services instead uses proprietary technology to develop and capture the signature of Netflix programming across its national panel, and that information is then projected out to estimate metrics across a larger swath of viewers.

“[It] allows us to take a broader sweep of what’s available on SVOD platforms,” Clarken told WSJ. “It’s a massive expansion to 2014.”

And Nielsen hopes it can stay ahead of any moves by the streamer to circumvent its ability to collect the data.

“I would never, ever underestimate Netflix and their technical abilities, but we do feel like the approach that we’ve taken is pretty sound and sustainable,” Fuhrer told Adweek.

Nielsen began measuring streaming content in 2014, but studios could previously only access data about their own shows, and were restricted to using it for internal purposes only.

Now, Nielsen will be both measuring and publicly sharing the streaming data.

“The question I always get is, ‘How did my program do?’” Fuhrer said to Adweek. “And the second question is, ‘How did it do in comparison with everybody else?’ That second key question is what we’re trying to answer.”

READ MORE: The Wall Street Journal, Adweek

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