By Helen Coster

(Reuters) NBCUniversal has lowered its expectations of TV ratings for the Beijing Winter Games, based on time and platform. The company made the announcement Tuesday as it prepared to air its second Olympic Games during a pandemic.

Comcast (NASDAQ:) Corp-owned NBCU and other media companies are also wrestling with a ratings measurement system they say fails to capture consumers’ shift to streaming.

“If somebody said, are you reducing your estimates for digital consumption I’d say no; they will explode exponentially,” said Mark Marshall, NBCUniversal’s president of advertising and client partnerships. “The issue we’re having right now as an industry is that changes in consumption are not being captured by measurement. Until we do, there’s going to be a leak in our ability to capture audiences.”

NBC’s broadcast of the Tokyo Games, which were delayed for a year because of the pandemic, drew the smallest audience for the Summer Games since NBC began broadcasting them in 1988.

Advertisers and media companies rely on Nielsen to provide the “common currency” for measuring TV ratings, the backbone of the industry’s business model. Nielsen ratings allow advertisers to monitor viewers and enable networks to set the prices for advertising slots.

NBCU has come under criticism for its Nielsen approach in the past, as have many other clients from the TV industry. Nielsen gauges TV audience through the use of a small sample group who have special devices at home.

NBCUniversal, a leading TV measurement and consulting firm, announced this month that it had entered into a multiyear partnership with iSpot.tv to gauge its viewers in new ways. This includes traditional linear, streaming, time-shifted, and streaming viewing.

NBC will stream every Beijing event live on Peacock’s premium tier, in addition to airing coverage across the NBC broadcast network, USA Network and CNBC cable networks, NBCOlympics.com website and NBC Sports app.

The company announced Tuesday that NBCU will guarantee a specific audience to clients who invest between $2 million and $4 million in Olympics advertising.

Insider first reported this detail and the fact that NBCU was lowering its expectations of TV ratings for the Olympics.