NBC Universal plans to use its coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games to launch a new system for measuring viewership across an array of different media, including video-on-demand, cellphones and the Web, as well as traditional television.

NBC hopes the new system -- which will be offered to advertisers at the start of the new fall season -- will give it ammunition to persuade advertisers to buy ad time on newer media such as VOD and cellphone video. That's a big issue for media companies, facing an erosion of audiences and ad dollars at their traditional outlets.

Associated Press

Michael Phelps competes in the 100-meter butterfly final at Saturday's U.S. Olympic trials in Omaha, Neb. While TV networks are putting programming on a growing number of outlets, hoping to catch viewers whether they are surfing the Web or watching on their phones, NBC at least isn't satisfied with measures currently available to track viewing on these different outlets. The dominant firm tracking TV viewing, Nielsen Corp.'s Nielsen Media Research, has introduced services to measure Web usage and mobile viewing, but it uses different techniques. While it tracks TV viewing mostly through a device attached to TV sets, its mobile-device measurement relies on surveys of consumers and data from customer bills on what videos have been downloaded. Nielsen is expected to roll out a more advanced system this year.

"We need to demonstrate that money spent on the Olympics was money well spent," says Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co. "Management said to me we have to figure out a way to go beyond Nielsen to measure this stuff." A spokesman for Nielsen said the company is "doing more total measurement for NBC than in any other Olympics."

During the Olympics, in addition to releasing the traditional Nielsen TV ratings during the Games, NBC will issue a daily "Total Audience Measurement Index (TAMI)." It will include measurements of viewership on all the media venues airing NBC's Olympic programming -- the NBC broadcast network, cable channels such as Oxygen and CNBC, NBC's Web sites, video-on-demand services and mobile programming. To collect data for online, mobile and VOD usage, NBC will work with data providers such as research company Rentrak Corp., online measurement firm Quantcast Inc. and Web analytics firm Omniture.

The new measurements will be used only for research purposes during the Games, as most of the ad deals have already been negotiated and are based on traditional Nielsen ratings data. But the new measurement could be part of ad negotiations for the next Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia.

NBC shelled out $894 million for the broadcasting rights to the Beijing games, a steep price tag for the 17-day sporting extravaganza, which because of the time difference with the U.S. could be one of the least watched on network TV.

In addition, network executives say this will be the biggest production event in television history, surpassing the $125 million the company spent in 2000 on the Sydney Games. NBC says ad time on Olympics is about 80% sold and the company says it expects to bring in more than $1 billion in ad dollars.

NBC plans other research efforts during the Games. On top of the daily release of the data, NBC will also poll an online panel of 500 people daily to come up with deeper insights about their media habits. They will try to find out things such as the overall amount of time consumers spent on various media and where they watched a particular Olympic event. NBC will use Nielsen's IAG to conduct another poll to measure how commercials and online ads resonated with consumers and whether viewers can recall what products are being peddled.

Forty other consumers have volunteered to carry a special cellphone that will pick up audio cues from NBC networks airing Olympic coverage as well as have software installed on their computer that will track how much they use the Web to watch the Games.