It seemed like a good idea: full deduplicated stats for Australia’s free-to-air and BVOD broadcasting, accurately and promptly, the day after content had been watched.

But while the industry has been ramping up to the launch of consolidated viewer figures from December 29, it has had to come to terms with the fact that streaming giant Foxtel doesn’t want to play. The news came in an announcement last month that Foxtel “will no longer be reported in OzTAM datasets, including VOZ for Total TV and VPM (video player measurement)”, from the end of the year.

That leaves Seven, Nine, Paramount 10, ABC and SBS, “committed to VOZ as a currency which has also been supported and celebrated by the industry”.

Free-to-air TV negotiations will be based on VOZ data, commencing from September and OzTAM is also currently evaluating big data opportunities and how this could integrate with VOZ in the future.”

Chief executive Karen Halligan is “hopeful” that future collaborations may involve Foxtel “in some capacity”, but the announcement that Foxtel was leaving “in favour of exploring an alternative approach” is a severe setback.

As things stood – and stand, but without Foxtel – VOZ is set to bring viewing on TV sets and granular BVOD together in a single, national, de-duplicated database.

Components include more than 20,000 viewers in metro and regional homes, data from more than 65,000 surveys a year, about 4000 streaming meters in panel homes, and VPM measurement of BVOD from more than 16 million connected devices, for use in planning, reporting, trading and post-analysis.

Virtual Australia, or ‘VOZ’, was to have beens the foundation of Australia’s ‘Total TV’ measurement standard, “a significant step change in the way Australian television is measured and evaluated”.

With the investment in “best practice cross screen measurement”, OzTAM promises “several key initiatives”, as well as the VOZ launch and a solution for multi-broadcaster programmatic BVOD trading in VOZ Streaming, including SBS On Demand.

Pictured: Image from the VOZ website