Ratings company Nielsen announced this week it will expand its definition of television with a new comprehensive plan to measure video viewing across multiple platforms including broadband, Xbox and iPads. The decision to reach beyond traditional television viewing comes from the What Nielsen Measures Committee, a group comprised of members representing TV and cable networks, local TV stations, ad agencies and several big brand advertisers.

“The decisions made by the committee are not binding but a source at one of the big four networks was ecstatic at the prospect of expanded measurement tools,” notes The Hollywood Reporter. “The networks for years have complained that total viewing of their shows isn’t being captured by traditional ratings measurements. This is a move to correct that.”

Nielsen plans to have the new system in nearly 23,000 TV homes by September of this year.

“Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the Xbox and PlayStation,” explains the article.

While broadband-enabled iPads and other tablets are expected to have a limited presence in the first phase of the measurement update, a second more comprehensive phase plans to include more devices.

“The shift doesn’t mean Nielsen will begin to provide ratings data for, say, Netflix,” notes THR. “Nielsen will capture how much time is spent on that kind of viewing, but to actually provide ratings, Netflix would have to agree to encode its program signals so that Nielsen software can identify them and trace their source. The traditional TV networks do encode their signals to be compatible with Nielsen’s measurement tools.”