If you thought mobile advertising was hard to measure, Nielsen reckons over-the-top TV and video services is much harder – so it aims to integrate its ad measurement systems with box makers at the system level.

“Over-the-top is a really challenging space,” Nielsen product leadership SVP David Wong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “A year or two ago, people were saying, ‘Mobile is a really challenging space’. In comparison, over-the-top is even worse.

“You’ve got 12 different devices and platforms, all of which use different operating systems, all of which have no standards about how they put advertising out there or content out there. The services getting put on these platforms are growing so quickly that every month there is something new you have to measure.”

That’s why Nielsen and Roku, back in April, announced a partnership in which ads in services carried by the digital video box maker will be measured by Nielsen. The deal is indicative of the approach Nielsen is taking to the problem, in a quest for what it calls Total Audience Measurement.

“We’re trying to work with those platforms to enable measurement,” Wong says. “Roku is one of the first platforms to be measured using our Digital Ad Ratings – formerly OCR – service. We’ve built measurement in to the OS.”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.