Nielsen has scheduled a pilot program for its previously announced Digital Program Ratings, intended to measure online TV audiences. Broadcast and cable entities including ABC, AOL, A+E, CBS, Discovery, Fox, NBC and Univision are scheduled to participate in the ratings system testing May through July. The pilot program is the next step toward a broader commercial rollout, anticipated to launch later this year. “Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will track views primarily on the networks’ own desktop websites, with additional coverage for mobile devices planned for the future,” reports Adweek. “The Digital Program Ratings will provide overnight data such as the number of unique viewers, stream counts and reach by age and gender.”

“The networks have been putting pressure on Nielsen to update their methods to include digital views,” explains the article. “Nielsen has slowly been adapting to changing viewing habits, with last year’s debut of Online Campaign Ratings to measure the impact of digital advertising and February’s decision to measure broadband viewership. In December, Nielsen introduced its Twitter TV Ratings System, which was a step forward but a purely social measurement of television popularity.”

“Media companies want to make sure they get full credit with advertisers for online viewing,” notes the Wall Street Journal. “The technology in the Nielsen pilot program is step forward in that direction, but won’t provide everything media companies are looking for. It will track viewing of TV content on computers but not on tablets and smartphones.”

According to Eric Solomon, senior VP for Global Digital Audience Measurement at Nielsen, the primary obstacle in measuring traditional TV ratings based on online viewing, has to do with attempting to measure the duration a viewer watches content.

“What we want to do with the pilot is prove this concept,” Mr. Solomon said. “We want to understand what some of the gotchas might be before we do a commercial release.”