The Business Of Reinventing 'TV Households'

[Commentary] Once, it was perfectly clear that a TV Household would be a household with access to a working TV. Now, the trend toward thinking in terms of video consumption across all platforms, capable of delivering it rather than being constrained to the historic model of passive viewing of scheduled television broadcasts, has called the usefulness of that definition into question.

It’s not that the definition has become wrong, simply that it doesn’t encompass the array of viewing behaviors that advertisers, agencies and media owners are keen to understand and leverage. Logically then, the definition could be expected to move toward some kind of definition of a Video Household. This will only be supported if measurement of enough households can be equally comprehensive across at least the three leading video platforms of TV, online and mobile phone. (And ideally tablet, but we’ll have to see about that one.)

[Mike Bloxham is executive director, marketing for the Media Behavior Institute]