Maybe Nielsen can order a Nielsen report of the number of Nielsen failures Nielsen has made.

They can buy a few more years by simply doing what they’re currently doing.

pretend streaming doesn’t exist. Tell companies their viewership is higher than ever, that everyone LOVES intrusive ads, and the networks can lie to the advertisers with plausible deniability.

"(though they called it "zero TV households" instead of cordcutters)"

This is not merely weaselly. It is inaccurate. I cut the cord years ago. I still have a TV. It can get some, though not all, of the over-the-air channels in the major city near me. For most channels, I need to place the antenna, with a long coax cable, out the front door. I only bother for occasional sporting events. The most recent was for the women’s soccer world cup final. Come football season I will do it some more. So this is in no way a zero TV household. But I, the wife, and the kids routinely stream. It would never occur to them to haul the antenna out because it was eight o’clock and they wanted to watch whatever happened to be on.

This is really the result of technology advancement. The whole reason for Nielsen to exist in the first place was because television was a one way medium. One signal went out, but after that, the networks had no idea who was actually receiving that signal. In comes a methodology for deduction through the use of "Nielsen Households" and the manually maintained log of viewing habits. This was neither precise (not every household had one) nor reliable (human maintained logs could easily be wrong and imperfect).

Cable came along, and with later DOCSIS versions, companies gained the ability to actually snoop in on what people were watching and on how many TVs. But this was considered proprietary data to each local cable exchange, so those numbers would never reach Nielsen.

Now you have streaming options. Not only can the streaming provider know what you’re watching, it can also know how much of it you’ve watched, and if that viewing led to other shows. With each network launching its own streaming option, Nielsen becomes obsolete. In the end, it really doesn’t have anything to do with the expense. Nielsen could provide it for free, and it wouldn’t be nearly as accurate or accessible as the numbers the networks have in-house.

The next step of this is going to be that this viewership data will be considered trade secret, and not divulged to the public, a la Netflix. Production companies will just have to take the network’s word for it when they say that viewer numbers are down, which can become an unfair negotiating tactic that favors the networks. This where the evolution of the blackout will head: without cable companies as distributors paying retransmission fees, networks will start squeezing the production companies, giving an unfair advantage to their own content.

This is not academic. This is already happening with commercial internet services.

In the last 30 days they mailed this address $2 and $5.

The $2 bought a lotto ticket that didn’t win.

The $5 has yet to have this story attached to it: Ticket wins lotto from money Nielson sent and then bought the company to bury it.

So now gonna hold onto the $5 ’till the jackpot is big enough to have that story.

In Soviet Russia, digital cable watch YOU!!

Joking aside, when TV signals came from rooftop antennas, communication was in one direction only… so the only way to know if anyone was watching was to have someone like BBM or Neilsen survey and ask.

Go to a bidirectional communication medium, such as Internet streaming, and whomever runs the servers (or at least the CDN) already knows how many copies they sent out. No need for Neilsen.

It should be called cable-cutting, not cord-cutting. I still have tvs to watch dvds and vhs tapes and would never cut their cords.