India is a highly fragmented media viewing market, says U.S. audience measurement firm Nielsen

Anil Goel, the Global Chief Technology Officer at Nielsen Holdings, a New York-based audience measurement and data analytics firm, said India is the largest innovation base globally for Nielsen.

Capabilities and technologies built here have direct relevance to India, where viewing is highly fragmented and spread across television, streaming services, and digital devices.

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“Our Bengaluru engineering hub is the centre of Nielsen’s global technology leadership, focusing on accelerating product innovation, automation, and the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The operations in India span cross-platform audience measurement, media planning, marketing optimisation, and content metadata through Gracenote, supporting platforms across streaming, traditional television, and digital devices,” Mr. Goel told The Hindu.

For the company, addressing fragmented viewing patterns remains a core focus as consumers split screen time across linear television, connected devices, and smartphones. According to Nielsen’s India Internet Report, smartphone sharing is prevalent, with over a third of smartphone users sharing their devices, meaning single device logs often represent multiple individuals. Connected TV (CTV) adoption also exhibits sharp regional variation across the country: smart TV ownership stands at 25% in South India, followed by 16% in the West, 10% in the North, and 5% in the East.

He further said that to measure audiences accurately across these varied consumption habits, Nielsen employs a unified measurement approach. This model combines large-scale digital datasets with representative audience panels, utilising AI and machine learning to calibrate raw device signals into person-level metrics. Rather than relying solely on device-level logs or big data, which can contain incomplete signals and biases, panel data acts as a reference point to account for co-viewing, deduplicate audiences across screens, and measure incremental reach.

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“Amid the broader industry transition away from third-party cookies and identifiers, Nielsen is shifting toward privacy-first identity structures,” Mr. Goel added. “The framework relies on consented first-party data paired with panel-calibrated data science, enabling advertisers and publishers to evaluate unique audience reach across digital and linear environments without dependence on individual tracking cookies.”

In line with its cross-platform strategy, Nielsen has partnered with JioStar in India to extend campaign measurement to JioHotstar, providing metrics on total impressions, campaign reach, and on-target demographics. Furthermore, structured metadata provided by Gracenote helps standardise content categorisation across platforms, supporting search and discovery in India’s multilingual and multi-screen entertainment ecosystem.

On the global corporate front, Nielsen announced a $2.15 billion agreement to acquire DoubleVerify, a software platform for digital media measurement, subject to regulatory approvals.

“Responding to a query on what this proposed acquisition means for Indian brands navigating programmatic ad fraud and brand suitability,” Mr Goel explained, 

“The acquisition is expected to give advertisers a single view of audience reach and media quality by combining Nielsen’s audience measurement capabilities and DoubleVerify’s expertise in media quality verification, invalid traffic detection, viewability, and brand suitability. For brands investing in programmatic advertising, this helps address the challenge of evaluating campaign reach alongside the validity of ad impressions,” he added.