If you thought broadcasters’ newfangled ways of selling TV ads using advanced audience-buying tools in 2017 will freeze traditional TV measurers out in the cold, think again.

Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.

To many, these new techniques may seem to supercede the traditional TV measurement system operated by Nielsen.

But not only does Nielsen nowadays have its own set of products aiming to measure TV and video across multiple platforms for publishers and advertisers – OpenAP is also part-powered by the company.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen global president Steve Hasker says: “From a Nielsen perspective, this is good news, because our data can and will feed in to those platforms pretty seamlessly. We’ve built it so it provides a true cross-platform comparability in terms of its audience measurement.

“No matter how a marketer wants to use those platforms (or) wants to use that data), we’re able to provide it seamlessly.”

Nielsen is making its audience segments, household, personal and buyergraphic TV ratings data available through OpenAP, the company announced in April. The system also leverages Accenture and comScore know-how.

To Hasker, cross-platform media measurement has now reached an inflection point.

“We’ve been talking about measurement for years,” he says. “This year, this upfront, this conference, we’ve really made some progress as an industry.

“I think we’ve seen more progress in the measurement ecosystem … in the last 12 months than we have in the previous 12 years.”

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page