Nielsen has finally decided to change its strategy of measuring TV viewership to better suit the digital age. From this fall, the company’s ratings will include data from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the decision comes from a committee of representatives from TV networks and advertisers. From this September onwards, Nielsen will release new hardware and software to the 23,000 American homes that they get their data from.

Nielsen will monitor data viewed on devices from set-top boxes to video game consoles, and tablets are also in the list although at first there will be a limit in the amount of data that will be drawn from them. But, apparently, their ultimate aim is to “capture video viewing of any kind from any source”. This clearly shows just how important the Internet has become, and how it has truly changed the way that many people are watching their latest shows and movies.

Considering that Nielsen’s current system is pretty limited, this certainly seems like a step in the right direction. What do you think?

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So, in the battle royale involving a little green bot, a half-bitten produce, and some Canadian fruit, who reigns supreme? Nielsen has compiled its statistics for the period covering November 2010 to January 2011 and is presenting it in the form of a couple colorful stacked bar graphs.

The first chart shows the major smartphone platforms, which are then further broken down based on the manufacturers using those platforms. Naturally, Apple owns the entirety of iOS and RIM owns the entirety of BlackBerry. They’re neck and neck at 27%. However, the combined efforts of the Android conglomerate add up to 29%, mostly led by HTC (12%) and Motorola (10%), with Samsung (5%) supplying a sizable chunk too.

What’s interesting is that HTC is also the biggest contributor to the Windows Phone 7 market share too. The platform as a whole has 10%, but HTC is providing nearly three quarters of that, once again followed by Moto and Sammy. In this way, if you combine HTC’s efforts, it accounts for 19% of total smartphone market share. That’s getting close to the exclusive RIM and Apple territory, don’t you think? HTC even has a chunk of the HP webOS pie.

If we consider that both Android and WP7 are on the rise (one more than the other), will it be long before HTC actually holds more market share than either BlackBerry or iPhone? It’s really not that far fetched and HTC has been in the smartphone game for a very long time.

On a side note, the second chart isn’t quite as noteworthy. By and large, smartphone market share remains relatively consistent (in terms of proportion) across age groups, though RIM is preferred just a touch more by the older crowd (corporate types) while Android leans toward the younger set.

[Nielsen]

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As of year end 2010, a little over a third (31%) of all mobile users in the United States were using smartphones. According to Nielsen, Asian/Pacific Islander and Hispanic consumers were the most likely to own a smartphone with both at 45%, followed by African-American consumers at 33% and, with only 27%, White mobile users were the least likely to choose a smartphone over a feature phone in their mobile purchases. It was also found that there is a significant skew towards the younger mobile consumers in the population as being smartphone users.

Research data from Nielsen goes on to categorize each ethnic group and the percentages of that group that prefer specific smartphone operating systems. Preferences among White and Hispanic mobile users are nearly identical with similar numbers for the three major platforms: Android, BlackBerry and iPhone. Compare that to the other two ethnic groups, both of which seem to prefer one platform to the others. It was found that 31% of the smartphone-owning African-American population had BlackBerry devices, and 36% of Asian/Pacific Islanders owned an iPhone.

We can only assume why these numbers turned out to be this way, whether it is only a coincidence or if there really is a cultural or a universal preference among people of certain races, but it is interesting to see where the pieces are falling.

[HuffPo]

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