If you’re a fan of blight and violence, you can probably do a lot worse for yourself than spending a few hours watching NFL games from the 1970s on YouTube. Stick to the four teams in the rust-bucket AFC Central and you’ll bear witness to a style of play that seems to have been forged in madhouses and army barracks; absent the protections of the present day, quarterbacks were routinely pounded into suet a good two-Mississippi count after they’d released the ball.

Beyond this largely uncurbed distribution of pain, there are plenty of aesthetic curiosities to linger over. This, after all, was the dawn of the concrete donut era, when the newly poured multipurpose stadiums were as ugly as the bone-splintering hits that took place within their unfriendly confines. Every field seemed to underscore our collective desire for folly; for some reason, there were always a couple of Buick Skylarks parked by the north end zone of Three Rivers Stadium.

If it’s funny to watch a wide receiver having to negotiate a four-door sedan that’s idling in the middle of his route, it’s perhaps just as funny to consider how the audience for football’s auto-hurdling epoch was measured. Back in the day, Nielsen extracted its TV-viewership data by way of paper diaries, which were to be filled out by upstanding citizens and returned to the company at the end of each week. The shortcomings of such a system are hard to overlook; for one thing, humans are remarkably absent-minded creatures, and for another thing, they tend to lie all the time for no good reason.

The introduction of passive people meter devices eliminated much of the noise in the data—your self-reported enthusiasm for The MacNeil/Lehrer Report would soon prove to be a smokescreen for that mortifying Hee Haw habit you’d hoped to keep from the swells on Madison Ave.—but Nielsen’s overhaul was far from complete. As technology advanced and viewer habits evolved, the company would continue to make significant changes to its data collection and processing procedures.

This week marked yet another refinement of Nielsen’s methodology, and while some of the details regarding accreditation are arguably of limited interest to normal people, suffice it to say that the networks during the 2025-26 upfront bazaar will be able to price and guarantee their inventory against souped-up TV ratings that now include first-party livestreaming data. In other words, Nielsen’s legacy TV panel measurement will be enhanced by data culled from set-top boxes and smart TVs across some 45 million U.S. households. 

We’ve already seen how the steroidal ratings scheme might impact some select real-world deliveries, thanks to a trial run with Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football package. Upon the application of the first-party data, Amazon’s TNF deliveries improved 8%, with an average net gain of 1 million impressions per game. That’s a significant lift, although those who buy and sell TV time do not expect that similar gains will be apparent in the day-to-day ratings reports.

Thus, the new way of counting the house won’t necessarily remedy many of the ratings declines that have been plaguing live sports in recent months. Buyers and sellers would prefer to live with the new data for a while before they’re ready to project how the improved methodology might impact the daily deliveries, although this here ’78 Lincoln Town Car says the so-called Big Data + Panel will be the talk of this year’s upfront presentations. (The networks’ purported eagerness to sell against the new data will be reflected in their spring rates. Pricing differentials should go a long way toward determining how much of a boost the sellers expect to see over the course of the next broadcast season.)

Although it would stand to reason that the inclusion of millions upon millions of previously unaccounted-for devices should coincide with a general ratings lift, the gains are unlikely to be evenly distributed. While it’ll take some time for the BD+P impact to make itself known, live sports are expected to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the improved methodology—as was the case when Nielsen began blending out-of-home deliveries with its vanilla TV data in fall 2020.

Speaking of which, Nielsen is expected to announce the formal expansion of its OOH coverage shortly before Super Bowl LIX kicks off in New Orleans on Feb. 9. As Sportico reported a year ago, the company began kicking the tires on beefing up its OOH reporting system beyond the 44 media markets it currently monitors, bringing its coverage from approximately 65% of all users to an even 100%.

In advance of the OOH shift, the NFL’s network partners have been given an advance look at how certain high-profile windows performed in light of a complete out-of-home count, and while the initial results may not have been earth-shattering—after all, the largest local markets are already included in the present scheme—the final deliveries for this year’s broadcast should reflect the expansion to a not-insignificant degree.

For what it’s worth, the last time Fox aired the Big Game (2023), OOH deliveries accounted for 17% of the overall TV turnout. Last year’s Chiefs-49ers game on CBS was informed by a similar dynamic, as 21% of all viewers took in the action from a bar, restaurant or a friend’s home.

In the meantime, Nielsen’s ongoing bid to provide more accurate/comprehensive measurement has secured its standing as the guardian of the currency that underscores the $70 billion TV ad market—this despite a decade’s worth of challenges from other data firms. Even the most generous estimates suggest that alternative currencies [sic] account for no more than 6% of all national TV spend, although that figure likely will rise should CBS and Nielsen fail to come to terms on a new contract.

YouTube videos may offer sentimental types and younger curiosity seekers a means to luxuriate in the Old Way of Doing Things, but only a maniac would truly want to go back to that era. Nostalgia hits harder than a handful of goofballs after a Joe “Turkey” Jones piledriver, but one of the advantages of today’s kinder, gentler NFL is that we get to enjoy our favorite players for much longer when they’re not being suplexed into the next world.

Same applies to how the sports we love get bought, sold and measured. The diaries were a quaint way of doing business, but in an era when a 4-bit Mattel Electronics Football game marked the bleeding edge of advanced technology, the TV biz used the tools that were at its disposal. Nielsen’s new wrinkle ensures that advertisers will be able to make smarter buys, while the networks will have more wherewithal to offset the ever-increasing costs of carrying the games that keep the lights on.