Las Vegas, NV (April 20, 2026)—Presented as part of NAB’s Programming Everywhere conference, Sunday’s “Finding Audience in Television’s Next Age” panel explored audience development in an era of fractured attention spans and an endless array of platforms.
Though coming from diverse parts of the industry, the speakers tended to agree on the challenges programmers faces when attracting and retaining viewers, as well as potential solutions.
The key to many of these issues is data—and deciding which metrics matter most.
“It has evolved from looking at audience size to really measuring outcomes,” said Paul LeFort, Managing Director, Local Media Client Solutions, Nielsen, explained, and part of measuring outcomes is looking at attention and engagemen.
“The content still resonates; how they’re getting to it, where they’re finding it and how they interact with it has definitely changed, but that engagement time spent is a great measure.”
There are many relevant metrics to work with, of course; the perennial challenges are deciding which to focus on, how to interpret them and most importantly, how to implement findings, particularly in online spheres.
Aaron Sisto, Co-Founder and CEO of Chronicle Studios, an AI platform that helps brands find and grow their audiences on social, felt that the key was to keep hands on the wheel 24/7—hence the need to implement AI in those efforts.
“Tou’re constantly optimizing, retargeting, understanding your audience, but also understanding the audience that isn’t even aware of your brand yet, and constantly pushing them through that funnel,” he continued.
“It’s more of a continuous process that you have to run across every platform in real time; that is literally why it must be agentic.”
LG Electronics VP of Content & Services Matthew Durgin shared insights into how the manufacturer measures how its devices are applied and used, as well as how their content offerings are curated and presented on home screens.
“The good takeaway there is that measurement should really have nothing to do with platform; it should have everything to do with totality of audience,” opined moderator Paige Albiniak, Contributing Editor, TVNewsCheck. “I think that’s still in process, how that’s measured, especially if you’re across a lot of platforms.”
There was discussion of finding common measurements that reach across a variety of platforms and focus more on what is being watched rather than where it’s being seen.
Shawn Makhijani, SVP of Business Development and Strategy / Senior Vice President NBCUniversal Television and Streaming / NBC Spot On, noted, “An interesting thing for us in broadcasting is how things are labeled, where sometimes, if you watch Channel 4 in New York on YouTube TV or Hulu, it’ll be described as ‘streaming.’ Now, as broadcasters, we don’t care if you watch it over the air, on cable, on YouTube TV.”
Yet such viewership may lead to conclusions that streaming is up. “This is what we as an industry need to normalize,” he said.