As TV audiences increasingly turn to online options for content discovery and consumption, audience-measuring firms such as Nielsen have made necessary adjustments regarding cross-platform analysis. The potential of the new metrics will be tested with Disney’s new Unified initiative in which ABC, ABC Family and ESPN will start using Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings to sell their ad inventory.

“Importantly, this isn’t just just regular TV advertising sweetened with a little bit of data from the Web,” reports The Verge. “ABC is making the biggest leap: its ‘ABC Unified’ campaign sells programs to advertisers across all platforms, from TVs to computers, tablets, and smartphones. One ad buy, one ‘audience guarantee’ — a breakdown of a show’s total audience combined across all of those platforms. ESPN is doing something similar but more limited, working on cross-platform ad buys with just a few advertising partners, while ABC Family is using Nielsen’s data to sell online video.”

The article additionally suggests that Nielsen’s new approach will likely impact which shows remain on the air and on which specific platforms they’ll be made available to viewers.

“Before, if a show like ‘Community’ had a devoted online following but a small traditional audience, NBC had relatively limited ways to capture that and advertisers had little reason to trust NBC’s data,” notes the article. “Now, in theory, everyone has a better picture of a show’s true reach.”

From a tech and platform perspective, ad purchasing can affect where content is shown. “If a show’s audience is measured and ads are sold in a single buy across all platforms, that creates a tremendous incentive for a network to maximize the number of platforms where its shows are available. It also makes it more likely that networks will push toward parity across those platforms,” explains The Verge.

“It no longer makes sense to have some TV shows or episodes available on the Web but not others, or to support streaming for the iPad but not the Apple TV. Measuring a show’s viewership on the Xbox means more TV will come to the Xbox; measuring a show’s viewership on over-the-top services like Intel Media means more programmers will be comfortable with TV delivered over the Internet; measuring a show’s viewership on smartphones means more shows will come to more smartphones.”

The push for unified online and offline ad buys could potentially result in changes to streaming video services such as Hulu and bring us one step closer to a realization of the TV Everywhere philosophy.

“It may be the only way out of the sluggish, half-hearted approach we’ve had for ad-supported TV on post-PC devices, from mobile to the living room: embrace the multi-device future completely, measure everything, and align everyone’s incentives around new standards to keep the revenue pump primed,” concludes The Verge.

“For the most part, it’s how television has always worked. If Nielsen’s and Disney’s bets pay off, it’s how most television will work in the future.”