2022 NBA Finals & Out-of-Home

Last month I made two posts looking at the ratings of the first and second rounds of the NBA Playoffs from 2019 and 2022 and estimating the out-of home (OOH) viewership. Nielsen began including OOH viewership as part of the linear ratings reporting beginning in September 2020, so it's been difficult to make meaningful comparisons between today's ratings and ratings from before Sept. 2020. And since Nielsen doesn't ever provide a breakout of the OOH from the in-home viewership, I used household (HH) ratings and viewers-per-home (VPN) estimations to extract the portion of the OOH audience that is now lumped in with the in-home audience.

Previously I only included 2019 and 2022 within these posts, but for the Finals, I think it's important to also look at 2018 to get a more accurate sense of what the VPH actually is for the Finals. I also included the ratings for 2020 and 2021, but that will be a later discussion point. I only have the exact HH figures (in millions) for the 2022 games (5/6 bolded), but the rest of the HH figures are estimations based on the HH rating and Nielsen's yearly HH Universe Estimates. Because we have the HH ratings to 2-decimal places for 2019-2022, the margin-of-error for the HHs estimate is only 0.006 million in either direction. It is a bit wider for 2018, but it shouldn't affect the calculation too much.

2022 NBA Finals
Date	Net	HH Rating	HH (mil)	Viewers (millions)		EST Viewers Per Home
June 2, 2022	ABC	6.08	7.445	11.400		1.53
June 5, 2022	ABC	6.17	7.552	11.911		1.58
June 8, 2022	ABC	6.24	7.632	11.522		1.51
June 10, 2022	ABC	6.16	7.543	12.063		1.60
June 13, 2022	ABC	7.00	8.576	13.025		1.52
June 16, 2022	ABC	7.47	9.149	13.992		1.53
Average		6.52	7.983	12.319		1.54
2021 NBA Finals
Date	Net	HH Rating	EST HH (mil)	Undercount Viewers (millions)	EST Viewers Per Home	Revised Viewers (millions)	EST Viewers Per Home
July 6, 2021	ABC	4.53	5.481	8.558	1.56	8.697	1.59
July 8, 2021	ABC	5.14	6.219	9.381	1.51	9.590	1.54
July 11, 2021	ABC	4.73	5.723	9.019	1.58	9.246	1.62
July 14, 2021	ABC	5.34	6.461	10.255	1.59	10.464	1.62
July 17, 2021	ABC	4.83	5.844	9.617	1.65	10.018	1.71
July 20, 2021	ABC	6.61	7.998	12.517	1.56	12.778	1.60
Average		5.20	6.288	9.891	1.57	10.132	1.61
2020 NBA Finals
Date	Net	HH Rating	EST HH (mil)	Undercount Viewers (millions)	EST Viewers Per Home	Revised Viewers (millions)	EST Viewers Per Home
September 30, 2020	ABC	4.06	4.913	7.413	1.51	7.689	1.57
October 2, 2020	ABC	3.58	4.332	6.609	1.53	6.780	1.57
October 4, 2020	ABC	3.14	3.799	5.935	1.56	6.076	1.60
October 6, 2020	ABC	4.37	5.288	7.540	1.43	7.696	1.46
October 9, 2020	ABC	4.76	5.760	8.890	1.54	9.192	1.60
October 11, 2020	ABC	4.17	5.046	8.291	1.64	8.590	1.70
Average		4.01	4.856	7.446	1.53	7.671	1.58
2019 NBA Finals
Date	Net	HH Rating	EST HH (mil)	Viewers (millions)		EST Viewers Per Home
May 30, 2019	ABC	7.90	10.179	13.382		1.31
June 2, 2019	ABC	8.04	10.360	13.955		1.35
June 5, 2019	ABC	7.82	10.076	13.348		1.32
June 7, 2019	ABC	7.60	9.793	13.037		1.33
June 10, 2019	ABC	10.64	13.710	18.601		1.36
June 13, 2019	ABC	10.74	13.838	18.764		1.36
Average		8.79	11.326	15.181		1.34
2018 NBA Finals
Date	Net	HH Rating	EST HH (mil)	Viewers (millions)		EST Viewers Per Home
May 31, 2018	ABC	10.0	12.890	17.354		1.35
June 3, 2018	ABC	10.31	13.290	18.471		1.39
June 6, 2018	ABC	10.4	13.406	17.852		1.33
June 8, 2018	ABC	9.3	11.988	16.242		1.35
Average		10.0	12.893	17.480		1.36

In looking only at 2019 and 2022 as we've been doing, the same trend from the first two rounds is visible. Despite HHs being down nearly 30% (11.33 million to 7.98 million), viewership is down only about 19% (15.18 million to 12.32 million), and the VPH estimate appears to jump over 15% (1.34 to 1.54).

Year	HH Rating	EST HH (mil)	Viewers (millions)	EST Viewers Per Home	Average VPH
Out-of-Home Not Included with Linear
2018 Average	10.0	12.893	17.480	1.36	1.35
2019 Average	8.79	11.326	15.181	1.34
Out-of-Home Included with Linear
2020 Average	4.01	4.856	7.671	1.58	1.58
2021 Average	5.20	6.288	10.132	1.61
2022 Average	6.52	7.983	12.319	1.54
2019 to 2022 % Difference		-29.52%	-18.85%	15.38%

I'm going to just copy-paste my explanation from the previous article about using HHs and VPH to estimate total viewership:

"HH are a fairly reliable way of estimating total viewership as long as you have an idea of how many viewers-per-home (VPH) a particular type of programming usually maintains. Generally, one can multiply the the number of households by the VPH and have a pretty close estimate for the total number of viewers."

In the NBA Finals, the VPH has historically risen from the earlier rounds of the playoffs. In 2019, it rose to 1.34 (from 1.31 in round 1 & 1.32 in round 2), and in 2022 it rose to 1.54 (from 1.44 in round 1 & 1.48 in round 2). Because this is the finals, I wanted to make sure I was as accurate as possible, so I also found the VPH estimate from 2018 which was 1.36 - very comparable to the 2019 number. 

Averaging those, I got an expected NBA Finals VPH of 1.35 and used that to estimate what the total number of in-home viewers were in 2022. By applying 1.35 to the 2022 HH figures, it appears that OOH accounted for about 12.5% of the total reported viewership (or about 1.54 million on-average) while the comparable viewership number to 2019 is about 10.777 million.

2022 NBA Playoffs Finals	Viewers (millions)	%
In-Home Estimate	10.777	87.48%
Out-of-Home Estimate	1.542	12.52%

This 3-part analysis has almost wholly ignored both the 2020 and 2021 playoffs for a couple reasons. First, they both were played outside of the traditional timeframe which brings in additional variables I can't control for. And second, they aired during the 15-month window that Nielsen accidentally undercounted OOH viewership, so the numbers weren't even accurate anyway. However, Paulsen over at Sports Media Watch was able to acquire the elusive revised viewership figures for both 2020 and 2021, so I wanted conclude by looking at that real quick.
Overall, the viewership undercount doesn't seem to be all that drastic: off by 3% in 2020 (~224K) and 2.4% in 2021 (~241K), but even with these revised numbers, it's basically an impossible task to attempt to break out the in-home from the OOH. Due to impact of the pandemic, it doesn't really make sense to use the 1.35 expected VPH in either of those years because circumstances were not normal (one could also argue whether or not 2022 is even "back to normal"). We'd expect the VPH in those years to be a lot higher regardless because more people were staying at home than would normally, so any attempt at estimating OOH for those years I believe would be fruitless. 
With that, I think 2022 offers us the first real glimpse at what the OOH impact will be on NBA Finals ratings, and sports ratings in general, going forward. I'm curious to see if ~1.54 holds as our new NBA Finals viewers:households ratio because despite 1.58 & 1.61 appearing in 2020 & 2021, I think the "new normal" number will continue to be less than that.

Source: Nielsen Media Research via ShowBuzzDaily, Sports Media Watch, & Programming Insider