Netflix joins Australian TV ratings system
Netflix’s Australian audience figures will be publicly available for the first time, as it becomes the first international streaming service to sign up to Oztam’s TV measurement system.
Netflix will have its audience independently measured, and reported via Streamscape, Oztam’s new total video report.
Streamscape calculates viewing figures across connected TVs, smartphones, tablets, and computers, through the use of streaming meters installed into homes. This meters capture internet usage at the home router level.
The data isn’t internal Netflix data, but sample-population based, like the rest of the Oztam ecosystem. The measurement company said this will allow agencies and marketers to compare data from different TV platforms in a standardised format.
At the Future of TV Advertising event last month, Oztam CEO Karen Halligan said 4,600 of these meters were already installed in Australian homes, and that it was “close to population representation”.
Halligan also said Oztam was “in advance conversations with streaming partners”, suggesting other major companies may soon jump on board. In the media release announcing the partnership, Halligan extended “an invitation to other streaming services in the Australian market to join this measurement initiative.”
Paramount Australia declined to comment when asked by Mumbrella whether the Paramount+ streamer would be part of the system. Mumbrella also reached out to Disney Australia, and Nine, regarding their streaming services, Disney+ and Stan.
Karen Halligan
This Netflix partnership is the latest move from Oztam, who launched its VOZ Streaming platform for programmatic BVOD trading last November, and the new VOZ Total TV measurement system in late December.
After spending its first decade of operations zealously guarding its viewership figures, Netflix has slowly thawed when it comes to audience transparency.
It started sharing weekly Top 10 lists, both global and sortable by region, as well as half-yearly engagement reports. As with all self-reporting, these metrics tend to highlight the victories, and ignore anything else.
In October 2022, Netflix joined the British ratings agency, Barb, the first market in the world in which independently audited Netflix viewing figures were published.
This turned out to be a savvy move: in the last quarter of 2024, Barb found that Netflix’s audience reach overtook BBC1 for the first time.
It has since joined similar third-party ratings systems in other major markets, including the US, Mexico, Poland, France, and Germany.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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It certainly doesn’t feel like a legacy measurement any more does it…? Foxtel want to give their partners transparency, but surely the only way to do that is by showcasing data via a level playing field, which is what Oztam is increasingly providing….
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