TelevisaUnivision, Nielsen Squabble Over Single Household That Appears to Skew Spanish-TV Ratings (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor A single home in the rural southeastern U.S. stands at the center of a growing rift between Nielsen and the Spanish-language broadcasting giant whose audiences it measures.

Executives at TelevisaUnivision are livid about a quirk in Nielsen’s process of tabulating the audiences for Spanish-language TV that they say is giving rival Telemundo a significant boost in estimates of young male viewers tuning into news shows and other programming, But the lifts, these people say, are based on Nielsen’s reliance on one household where five Spanish-speaking residents have no access to TelevisaUnivision’s stations, just Telemundo’s.

And Nielsen’s extrapolation of that home’s activity has created inaccurate audience estimates that TelevisaUnivision believes could hurt its prospects heading into the “upfront” market, when U.S.

media companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming. “For them to not act on the anomaly right now of this data is unacceptable,” says Donna Speciale, president of U.S.