CBS Announces New Live +7-Day Rating Reporting Season

CBS today announced that effective with the start of the 2014-2015 television season (Sept. 22), the Network will supplement its daily Nielsen preliminary fast affiliate ratings with Live + 7-Day rating projections, marking a further shift toward a metric that better reflects the total audience and monetization value of its programming.

"L7 and C7 are the metrics that more accurately account for how viewers watch our shows and how we get paid for our programming - both in advertising and content licensing," said Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. "C7 deals were a significant part of our Upfront negotiations this year, and we are doing more and more C7 deals all of the time. As new technologies continue to improve audience measurement across all platforms, these more precise metrics are becoming the industry standard, benefitting advertisers and content providers alike."

"To report audience results for programs the day after they air live is comparable to reporting the results of a baseball game after the fifth inning," said David Poltrack, Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President, CBS VISION. "The only way to accurately compare the audiences across all programs is to include more time-shifted viewing. In order to enable the timely analysis of each day's television viewing, we will develop Live+ 7-Day projections for each of our programs based on the distinctive historical increases in viewers for each program. For new programs, these projections will initially be based on the time-shifting pattern of programs in the same genre until we have actual results for them over a seven-day time frame."

CBS will release daily L7 projections in viewers, adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 that will include percentage increases over each program's live plus same day averages. The L7 ratings will supplement each morning's release of the Network's preliminary fast affiliate ratings along with individual program and nightly rating highlights.

To post a comment, you must register and login.