How many are watching the Olympics?

NBC attempts a tricky head count to find out

Each day of the Winter Olympics, NBC reports how many viewers watched the previous night’s coverage, and analysts and television executives attempt to divine what those numbers mean.

But NBC isn’t touting traditional Nielsen ratings, the television standard for decades. Instead, for primetime viewing, the network primarily cites a recently created standard of its own making called total audience delivery, or TAD. It takes the ratings from the broadcast channel NBC and cable channels like NBCSN that are showing the Olympics and combines them with viewership across various streaming platforms to produce one number.

NBC’s number-crunching is only partly a marketing campaign. It is principally the latest attempt at a valid head count in an industry where no one seems to be able to measure the crowd. Viewers are spread too far and wide, no longer huddled around the TV.

NBC also used TAD during the Rio Olympics two years ago, but this is the first time it has sold advertising based on it. Guarantees to advertisers about how many people will watch commercials will be based on TAD, not Nielsen household ratings. As

television audiences shrink, that is a big deal for the network, which says its national ad sales for the Winter Games recently passed $900 million. And NBC Universal has committed $8 billion for the media rights to the Olympics through 2032.

“Advertisers now recognize that a viewer is a viewer,” said Dan Lovinger, NBC Sports’ executive in charge of sales. He eschewed the idea that there is a fundamental difference between television and digital viewers. “What we are doing now is adding it all together and treating a viewer as a viewer.”

For decades Nielsen produced easy-to-compare measurements of how many people watched a program and what percentage of U.S. households they represented. But an exploding array of technologies—first TiVo and other digital video recorders, and now streaming players like Rokus, computers and phones—has fragmented viewing across dozens of different platforms, a large factor in the broad decline in television ratings.

With billions of dollars in commercial time at stake, content providers, and especially media companies that own expensive sports rights, have raced to keep up. Scripted programming can have a long shelf life and be sold over time in a variety of ways, but the vast majority of sports is watched live, which means broadcasters need to capture every viewer possible and figure out how to count them.

The catch is that they aren’t yet in agreement on how to do that.

“In order for the industry to move forward, we have to coalesce around a single-source approach,” said Cary Meyers, head of ESPN’s consumer-research division, where the network is working directly with Nielsen on a live audience metric that would be a different version of TAD.

NBC appears unwilling to take any chances with the Winter Games, particularly after facing an unexpected decline in traditional, or “linear,” TV ratings in Rio, when it had to offer free commercial time to advertisers to meet its ratings guarantees. Streaming surged during that period.