The paper, called Solving Today’s Evolving TV Measurement Puzzle, said the growing availability of big TV datasets had reduced barriers to entry in the marketplace, meaning different data sets, methodologies and outputs. 

In addition, the study highlights six critical methodological challenges faced by big-data measurement providers today, including assessing the impact of identity and addressing footprint coverage bias.

The other four challenges are onboarding, cleansing and combining of big data assets; metadata; integrating linear and digital streaming; and processes and methods for addressing coverage gaps and shortfalls. 

To address these challenges, the report recommends a collective and collaborative approach, including on the future of identity and the scoring and validation of identities.

Other recommendations include personification research to remediate the delay in migration to alternative currencies for demographic transactions, a single industry-accepted source and taxonomy to mitigate variations in metadata, and the creation of codified standards for smart TV data. 

Jon Watts, managing director at CIMM, said: “The US TV and video marketplace is fragmented and extremely complex, presenting significant challenges for measurement and currency, across different platforms and devices.

“Measurement vendors are working hard to address these challenges and are making tremendous progress, but there is scope to support their efforts through collaboration and cooperation. We hope this new study is a powerful contribution to the industry, helping to identify potential solutions to some of the biggest methodological challenges facing vendors.”