Vishal Shah
Vishal Shah, Head of Product and Analytics ANZ, MiQ
Australian TV is having a moment of genuine reinvention — but as it became clear at the Future of TV conference in Sydney last month, the tools haven't kept pace with the ambition.
Total TV remains a powerful drawcard for brands, but there's a growing call for the industry to meet the demand for measurement that matches how CMOs justify spending today — via brand lift and conversion metrics. We've entered the era of VOZ as trading currency, and networks are spending tens of millions proving TV's effectiveness, yet the fundamental question of where Australians are actually watching video, and how to plan against it, effectively remains unanswered.
The misinterpretation of VOZ
VOZ became Australia's official trading currency in December 2024, delivering de-duplicated audience estimates across broadcast TV and BVOD in a single database — a genuine world first. That deserves recognition. But VOZ was designed to do a specific job: measure the broadcast ecosystem. It covers broadcast TV and BVOD, and is explicit that it does not include SVOD and AVOD viewing. The problem isn't the currency — it's that planners have started treating "Total TV" as synonymous with "Total Video." Those are not the same thing, and as streaming fragments further, the distance between them grows wider.
To OzTAM's credit, the recent launch of Streamscape — and a landmark data deal with Netflix — signals genuine ambition to extend the picture beyond broadcast. But Streamscape sits alongside VOZ, not inside it yet. VOZ gives the market a strong, credible foundation. Streamscape shows the direction of travel. The question the industry needs to answer is: what do you build on top of that foundation today, to achieve the integrated, deduplicated view of total video consumption that planners actually need?
Collaboration for some, while others go rogue
Foxtel has chosen to go it alone, having exited OzTAM's datasets in 2024. The Video Futures Collective has emerged as a parallel industry body with its own research agenda. Tools like Adgile, while genuinely useful for tracking advertising presence across screens, remain anchored to Foxtel's ecosystem when it comes to SVOD visibility — leaving Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and Stan largely invisible. At FoTV, both Nine and Foxtel publicly backed the idea of a real-time cross-industry dashboard, which speaks to genuine appetite for collaboration. But appetite and action are different things when competing budgets are involved.
Which is precisely why glass-level measurement — ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) data collected at the screen itself, independent of any network relationship or commercial alliance — matters so much. It neither cares for commercial alliances nor needs a measurement body to negotiate access.
As AdNews captured neatly, agencies are openly questioning whether the industry's much-touted collaboration push is delivering anything actionable. The scepticism is warranted. The answer isn't to wait for industry consensus — it's to work with partners who've already built around the assumption that it won't arrive.
The YouTube elephant in the room
YouTube is now ranked Australia's number one streaming platform by Kantar, reaching more than 20.1 million Australians aged 18+ — 96% of the adult online population. This isn't passive, background viewing either. Adelaide's attention benchmarking places YouTube AU at 64.3 out of 100, a quality rating that scores media placements on their likelihood of capturing attention and driving outcomes. That puts YouTube squarely in the premium tier, outperforming both linear TV at 53.9 and CTV at 63.4. YouTube is no longer competing for video budgets. It's competing for premium video budgets.
The question then is simple: if a planning tool claims to show you where Australians are watching video, and excludes the platform reaching 96% of adult Australians — what exactly is it measuring?
What a real signal stack looks like
A signal stack — the combination of data sources a planning tool draws on to build its picture of who is watching what, where, and when — needs to be diverse and independent to be trustworthy. Some questions worth putting to your planners:
Are you measuring what's actually on the glass?
Panel data is valuable but limited in scope. ACR data — opt-in and content-agnostic — captures viewing behaviour at scale. Any credible planning tool needs both: a gold-standard panel dataset like VOZ, and a strong layer of raw viewing data to lend it scale and granularity.
Can you de-duplicate across all screens simultaneously?
Not just linear and BVOD. If you can't de-duplicate across YouTube CTV, SVOD, and linear at the same time, you're almost certainly over-counting reach or misattributing frequency.
Are your inputs genuinely platform-agnostic?
A planning tool built by a specific network or platform will always have a skew. Genuinely useful planning infrastructure needs to sit outside the ecosystem it measures. What's not helpful is using terms like "total" and "premium" flippantly — which is what we saw in some 2025 network upfronts, where the definition of "total" conveniently aligned with their own inventory.
Can campaign exposure data validate the plan post-campaign?
Planning against projected audiences is one thing. Closing the loop with deterministic, log-level campaign delivery data is another. The over-counting of reach matters not only at the planning stage, but after the campaign runs too.
What the industry - and marketers - should demand
If 2025 was the year Australia upgraded its measurement currency, 2026 should be the year marketers demand a genuinely total view of video — one that requires setting ego aside, both that of the network that wants to be the centre of your plan, and any tool that calls itself "total" while only measuring what's convenient.
Imagine a planning capability that pulls together signals that no single network, measurement body, or platform can offer alone. A tool that shows you that a genuinely, unbiased, independent total view of Australian screens actually looks like in practice. It’s closer than you think.