What you need to know:

• OzTam aiming to have total TV currency – including streamers and FAST channels – live in market by early 2027.
• ACR data via Nexxen and Samba being added to OzTam’s TV and streaming meter data to create proof-of-concept currency. After testing this year, industry consultation early 2026, then technical iron-outs, then go live.
• CEO Karen Halligan claims per capita, it will be the most granular system in the world.
• Aims to bring in more data providers to avoid skew and bias – but says having the two current ACR-based firms (automated content recognition) helps counter that problem as data comes from many different TV sets, e.g. expensive and lower end, inferring robust socio-economic demographic sample.
• While agencies will point to their own workarounds and tech, and can also buy that data from providers, Halligan says they don’t have OzTam’s panel and dedicated resource. “The reality is, it’s better together,” she suggests, a maxim she applies across the measurement piste amid risk of fracturing currencies and measurement inputs.
• Meanwhile, Halligan says TV audiences have risen 3.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 – with even linear up. Now to see whether the money follows the eyeballs, or other incentives.
• This story is part of Mi3’s full collection of industry trends, debate and developments from Future of TV Advertising ’25 which will roll out over the coming week in our editorial series here

As the TV and streaming industry today sets out its annual stall after 18 months of tension and division, OzTam is laying down a marker and a statement of its intent to bring everything together – with measurement beyond the broadcaster system. In other words actual total TV, across broadcast, streaming, apps and FAST channels.

CEO Karen Halligan also has an audience growth story to tell – with audiences up 3.6 per cent in the first quarter in terms of minutes consumed. Whether it counters the downbeat picture painted by marketer purse-holders at last year’s gloomy Future of TV event remains to be seen. But then market principles and principals are not always entirely logical.

It also remains to be seen whether Halligan will this week confirm industry speculation that one of the large streamers is set to join Voz Streaming – the cross-network API-based system launched late last year that allows advertisers to buy across Seven, Nine, Ten (and soon SBS) using the OzTam identifier to enable frequency capping and targeting while de-duplicating reach. Some suggested it could be Netflix. In the early plan for Voz Streaming, there was a push for it to also serve as a single platform to plan and buy digital inventory in the broadcaster system but is understood to have been scuppered by one network and OzTam shareholder.

For now on the conjecture of an SVOD platform joining VOZ Streaming, Halligan remains tight-lipped. But either way, she aims to have the new uber currency live by early 2027. She said the business has been working on it for 18 months, but has kept quiet “because of what happened previously with Voz,” which ran years behind schedule, leaving OzTam open to increasing criticism while agencies developed their own workarounds.

But the measurement body yesterday revealed the proof-of-concept phase is now about to go live, with data from 2.2 million connected TV sets via Samba TV and Nexxen added into the mix. The two providers, which track audience consumption via automated content recognition (ACR) tech embedded into TV sets, deliver sufficient breadth across household demographics to avoid skewing data, for example, to higher income households with expensive TV sets, per Halligan.

(In total, it means the fledgling currency will draw from those 2.2m households, plus 4,600 streaming TV meters and 16 million connected devices, selected from 65,000 Establishment Survey respondents annually.)

Bias buster

“With big data, what you can't do is take it from one source … otherwise what it does is biases the panel to the audience profile of that ACR data set,” Halligan told Mi3. “We’re also talking to a couple of other providers that might come in.”

Regardless, “if we're looking at 2.2 million connected TVs, per capita, we're looking at one of the largest sample sizes in the markets that are progressing down this path, if not the largest,” per Halligan. The US market is the only other market currently operating a similar hybrid panel, with Barb in the UK broadly running in parallel with OzTam’s development timetable, she added.

“The proof-of-concept will be assessing the shape of the day for Samba, the shape of the day for Nexxen, and then how does that compare to the panel? And then what does it mean for the quality of the data, the privacy compliance … how it can augment and enhance viewing for TV networks, streaming, partners, FAST channels etcetera – because we’re talking to quite an array of different partners,” said Halligan.

“Off the back of that, we’ll assess whether we have enough broad representation to apply that in a live currency model; do we need to do some weighting to make sure that it's really indicative and representative, so that we're addressing any nuances, ensuring we don't under represent ethnic or minority groups,” she added.

“So the proof-of-concept will assess that, and when we get to the end of that, we'll do an industry wide consultation, consult with the Media Federation, the AANA, show them the findings and get their support. Because in the US, they tried to push it through a bit faster, and then it got stalled,” said Halligan. “So I've got to take a different approach, more collaborative change management.”

2027 go live

Halligan expects to consult on findings by the year-end, work through technical implications in 2026, “and I am hopeful that we'll be looking at bringing it into service in early 2027”.

Perhaps prudently, Halligan included a timetable hedge.

“That is what we are targeting, but it will really come down to the findings of what's in the proof-of-concept. If the data skews really badly, then we're going to have to go back to the drawing board. But we've already done some preliminary assessment, and we're really confident that these two [ACR providers] give us enough breadth of representation that the likelihood of that being a huge problem is unlikely.”

The end game, “is to have the panel and overnight data coming out of the 2.2 million connected TV sets, and having a really, really granular, detailed audience measurement framework that will provide breadth and depth of data to any and all kind of platforms who wish to partner with us”, per Halligan.

She nodded to the rise of free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels, and the need to start measuring them properly if marketers and media buyers want accurate numbers on which to base investment decisions.

“The latest number I've been able to find is there's 650 FAST channels in Australia … None of those channels are measured effectively at the moment, except via the direct source – from the TV [manufacturer] – so there is no independent measurement, which is why we are trying to augment that and bring that in.”

‘Better together’

While agencies will likely support a currency that can measure across the TV and streaming piste, many will be equally likely to point to their own proprietary tools – just as they have done with Voz. Some will also argue that they can already buy the data feeds OzTam is now buying from Samba and Nexxen directly.

Halligan acknowledges both arguments, but said OzTam “already gives a sample Voz data set into one holdco at the moment and we already feed into some of their tools. So we would be working with them to augment their solutions, because they'll obviously want to do their own things in their own ways. But the sources of data that we'll have at hand will be independent, more robust than what they're accessing currently, and more granular”.

While agencies can and do buy directly from ACR providers, they will likewise need multiple sources to avoid the skews that OzTam is now working to balance out, she added.

“So unless they [agency groups] want to put on a team of experts to replicate what we do in population representation, with shifts in audience profile, understanding of devices in the home, then they're not going to actually be able to really accurately represent if that is all of Australia, or just one data profile,” said Halligan.

“I would rather focus on the strength of the partnership between ourselves Nexxen and Samba. We bring together their data sources with the [OzTam] panel of 8,600 and the establishment survey of 60,000 homes to ensure that how their data is represented aligns with the way the home population viewing pattern actually happens,” she said.

“Better together is the reality. It will be the single most accurate source of data to capture total viewing in the home. It future-proofs that with the ability to address rapidly changing behaviour. This will be a much more progressive solution than what we've been working with previously.”

With streaming meter data about to go live from almost 5,000 homes, two new products finally in market and a new uber currency build underway, OzTam has its work cut out.

“This year is going to be pretty big for us,” Halligan acknowledged. “We're going to have a lot of things hitting pretty quickly. It's going to be an interesting 12 months for the team.”

Follow the eyeballs?

For the broader TV industry, Halligan thinks things may be looking up – if media buyers and their investments follow the eyeballs rather than other incentives.

TV audiences “first quarter on quarter are actually up for the first time in quite a while”, she said. “Some demographics that would surprise you are also up – 18 to 39 is up in the first quarter. Whether it'll hold beyond quarter one, who knows. But I'm hopeful that it will and we are definitely seeing some stabilisation,” she added. “

“We're also seeing some return of audiences to linear, which we haven't seen to that level for quite some time.”

Overall, Halligan said total TV minutes consumed are up 3.6 per cent year on year for Q1, “and when you think about the fact that we've got 16.2 billion TV minutes consumed every week, that’s quite a lot.”

Hence Halligan voicing frustration that investment by marketers and media buyers does not appear to be following the audiences.

“The total picture is higher, total consumption of premium video [whether consumed via aerial, streaming or app] is higher. So why is money moving so quickly to other areas?”