Univision & Nielsen Sign New Contract.

Univision Communications Inc. and Nielsen Media Research announced they have agreed to a new contract that will provide comprehensive ratings for Univision’s local television stations.

Under the terms of the new contract, Nielsen will provide local ratings for the 34 Univision and TeleFutura owned-and-operated local stations through its Nielsen Station Index (NSI) and Nielsen Hispanic Station Index (NHSI) services, which includes Local People Meter service in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles San Francisco and Dallas.

Ceril Shagrin, Univision’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Research, said: “As the number one Spanish-language media company, it is vital that Univision is able to accurately assess its growing Hispanic television audiences. We have been diligently working with Nielsen on a variety of initiatives over the last several months, and are encouraged by the commitments it has made towards sample improvement.”

Susan Whiting, Nielsen’s President and CEO said: “Univision is one of Nielsen’s largest clients and we are delighted at this extended relationship. As American audiences grow increasingly diverse, the number of Hispanic viewers in the nation is increasing and therefore a more important part of the television audience. As a consequence of this trend, Nielsen continues to invest significant resources in improving the accuracy of our estimates, ensuring that Latino and all other ethnic audiences are fairly represented in our TV ratings.”

Nielsen and Univision have worked together for more than a decade to find more effective ways to measure the Hispanic television audience. In 1989, Univision was a charter subscriber to Nielsen’s first Local People Meter service launched in Los Angeles to specifically measure Hispanic television viewing. This was a pilot effort for what eventually became Nielsen’s National Hispanic Television Index, which was launched nationwide in 1992, and remains the only service of its kind.

More recently, Nielsen Media Research has been in the process of implementing the largest-ever expansion among Hispanic households as part of a four-year program to double the size of its national sample. During this time, Nielsen also has been launching Local People Meter services in 10 major television markets. The larger sample sizes in these LPM markets and the increased reliability of People Meter technology ensure greater accuracy for all ethnic and language groups.