It appears as if Nielsen is preparing to find yet another way to keep sports viewership trending upward ahead of the upcoming football season.

The audience-measurement firm, whose data is treated as the gold standard within the television business and is the currency by which networks sell advertising to media buyers, plans to formally roll out a new co-viewing initiative “as soon as September,” according to a report by Eric Fisher in Front Office Sports. The news comes after Nielsen piloted the co-viewing program during the month of February, measuring major sporting events like Super Bowl LX, the Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game, the Daytona 500, and the State of the Union. Across those events, Nielsen found that its updated co-viewing methods added 4.19% to total viewership.

Co-viewing, in layman’s terms, is when several people watch a telecast together in the same room. Nielsen’s new methodology introduces a wearable device that members of Nielsen households use to help determine how many viewers are in the room watching a given telecast. Previously, Nielsen households had to manually log the number of viewers in a room.

Since 2020, Nielsen has introduced a number of major methodological changes, all of which have had the effect of raising viewership data compared to historical norms. First, Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing measurements into its top-line data after years of reporting the number separately. Several years later, Nielsen expanded these out-of-home measurements, which initially reached just two-thirds of the country, to reach the entire contiguous United States. Shortly after, Nielsen implemented “Big Data” into its measurements, which collects data from millions of connected televisions and incorporates that data into its traditional panel measurements. The co-viewing change would mark the fourth major methodology shift in six years.

“This is obviously complex stuff, but our goal is still very simple: we want to be as accurate as possible, and this is the next iteration of Big Data,” Nielsen’s head of global sports, Seth Ladetsky, told Front Office Sports.

To be sure, each change has, in theory, resulted in more accurate measurements of television audiences, particularly for live sports programming, which tends to over-index in out-of-home viewing and co-viewing. However, it muddies historical comparisons, especially dating back to before 2020.

There is, of course, a clear incentive for Nielsen to implement changes that result in higher viewership. The firm’s biggest clients are the television networks that broadcast live sports, and the leagues that those networks pay billions of dollars to air. And these changes aren’t happening in a vacuum. The NFL recently vocalized its frustrations with Nielsen about what it sees as a systematic undercounting of its audience, with a league executive specifically citing co-viewing as one of the main culprits. At the same time the NFL publicized these complaints, it began experimenting with one of Nielsen’s competitors, VideoAmp.

It would appear that the NFL will get its wish from Nielsen in time for Week 1 in September. As sports media observers have become accustomed to in recent years, expect the change to result in more record-setting audiences for networks and leagues.

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