Nielsen Media Research, for decades, has been not only the primary organization that tracks viewership for television shows, it's been the only one.

Now a group of networks, studios and even media companies are ready to provide some new competition for Nielsen.

Those involved include some of the biggest names in television production and distribution including News Corp., NBC Universal, CBS, Discovery and Disney. They also have some advertisers who spend billions of dollars a year in advertising on board, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever and AT&T, according to Financial Times.

They are all joined by GroupM and Starcom MediaVest, two media agencies that help put advertiser messages, worth some $70 billion each year, onto the air.

Nielsen has been under fire for many years on how it measures audiences, and whether or not its polling of 18,000 homes in the form of demographic samples, is enough to provide a proper gauge of how many people are watching particular shows.

This group isn't the first to try and compete with Nielsen. Others have come and gone in the past, including a company formed in Florida a few years ago named erinMedia that actually took Nielsen to court accusing it of holding a monopoly over the television audience measurement industry. That suit was later dissolved when erinMedia -- a company that wanted to get actual audience measurement through the use of set-top boxes -- scaled down its operations and pulled back on plans to provide television measurement.

"The most deficient thing is there's no single source measurement" for television and digital video, said Sam Armando, senior vice president of audience analysis for Starcom MediaVest. "The thing is not, 'Let's go out to replace Nielsen.' [However] it's not a leap of faith to think that another [measurement company] can come in and do both."