New York - Americans are watching more TV than ever before, as well as more time online and on mobile devices watching videos, according to audience measurement firm Nielsen's first "three-screen" report.

Mountain View, Calif. - Google (NASD: GOOG) is planning to introduce a new Internet audience measurement service, to compete with existing ratings provided by comScore and Nielsen, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. While those companies track which websites users visit by conducting surveys or using tracking software on select user groups -- and charge for their services -- Google's service will be free, and based mainly on data from Web servers, potentially providing broader results.

New York - NBC Universal and ratings and research firm Nielsen have announced a partnership to create a new sales and marketing metric, that will combine TV and Web video ratings with databases of consumer activity for broader overall product categories, including packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, automotive and movies. The companies said their effort will provide advertisers with "unprecedented connection between purchasing behavior and viewing habits across multiple platforms."

New York - Nielsen Business Media, the division of the ratings, publishing and events company that publishes titles including The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Editor & Publisher, Mediaweek and Adweek, has laid off 40-50 staffers, according to reports on Fishbowl NY and Folio.com.

New York - The Nielsen Company, a provider of media audience ratings and market research, announced on Monday that it will acquire IAG Research, a firm that conducts research to determine the effectiveness of TV advertising, for $225 million.

New York - The Nielsen Company announced on Wednesday an agreement with cable TV provider Charter Communications, that will give Nielsen access to anonymous digital set-top box data for analytical and potential TV audience measurement purposes. The data on 330,000 Charter subscribers in Los Angeles will be available to Nielsen beginning in the second quarter.

New York - Ratings and research firm Nielsen has acquired privately held, Utah-based Audience Analytics and its Audience Watch software, which Nielsen said will "significantly strengthen the company's ability to process, integrate, analyze and report large quantities of audience measurement data."

New York - Nielsen, the media ratings and research provider, announced on Thursday that it has made a strategic investment in NeuroFocus, a Berkeley, Calif.-based firm that specializes in applying brainwave research to advertising, programming and messaging.

New York - The Nielsen Company this announced the launch of a new video-on-demand audience measurement service, with Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), the nation's largest cable TV provider, signing on as the first data provider and customer of the service. Nielsen On Demand Reporting & Analytics (NORA) will aggregate and anonymously report on video-on-demand usage, based on real-time transactions collected at the set-top box level.

Arlington, Va. - Traffic at newspaper websites grew a record 6% in 2007, averaging 62.8 million unique monthly users during the fourth quarter, according to a report conducted by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).

New York - Ratings provider The Nielsen Company announced on Wednesday that it has partnered with digital watermarking developer Digimarc (NASD: DMRC), to launch a new service that will track online video distributed by media companies, social networks, peer-to-peer services and user-generated content sites.

San Francisco - Some 35% of U.S. "tweens," defined as kids aged 8-12, own a mobile phone, and 5% access the Internet over their phones each month, according to a new study from The Nielsen Company.

New York - Some 13.7% of U.S. TV households are equipped with a high-definition television and HD tuner capable of receiving HD signals, while 11.3% also receive at least one HD network or station, according to a report released on Wednesday by The Nielsen Company.

I spent the day yesterday at the Nielsen CGM Summit in NY listening to some panels and presentations from Nielsen and many of their clients about the future of measuring CGM.  One thing I was looking forward to about this event in particular is that the percentage of brands vs. agencies in attendance would be much more favored toward brands. 

New York - Ratings provider Nielsen and Disney's ESPN cable network on Wednesday announced a collaboration to measure how consumers use media across platforms including TV, the Internet and mobile devices. ESPN's signal is available in 93 million homes, and its website attracts 18 million monthly visitors. The new measurements will include data from Nielsen's TV/Internet Convergence Panel -- which measures TV and Internet use within the same home -- as well as from Nielsen Mobile and other sources.

New York - U.S. television viewing over the past year has remained at the record levels set in the prior year, while the number of homes with digital video recorders has more than doubled, according to a report from The Nielsen Company.

New York - The Nielsen Company on Friday announced the launch of DemoWatch, a new feature for its Web-based KeepingTrac service that lets advertisers monitor the demographic composition of their advertising audiences. DemoWatch links the demographic information from Nielsen's overnight television ratings with the commercial monitoring ability of KeepingTrac. Nielsen said the service could be of interest to food, alcohol, prescription drug and R-rated movie advertisers looking to adhere to guidelines governing to whom they can advertise.