AGF Videoforschung, the Frankfurt company that produces Germany's standard audience figures for television and video, and The Walt Disney Company today said they are examining whether Disney+ can be brought into AGF's active measurement. The announcement sets no date, names no technical partner and commits neither side to anything beyond the review itself.

Disney is not a newcomer at AGF. According to the announcement, the Disney Channel and the National Geographic channels are already part of AGF's linear TV measurement. What AGF and Disney Advertising are now assessing is the set of conditions under which the streaming service could follow them in.

In Short

Germany has one shared system for counting how many people watch TV and video, run by a company called AGF, and Disney+ is now talking to AGF about being counted in it. That matters because advertisers and agencies in Germany plan and pay for TV advertising using AGF's numbers, and Disney's streaming service currently sits outside them. Nothing changes yet: the two companies are only checking what it would take, and they have not said when, or whether, it will happen.

What AGF and Disney said

The announcement describes the move as "the next step" in the collaboration between AGF Videoforschung GmbH and The Walt Disney Company. Its operative verb is "prüfen" - to examine or test. Both companies, it says, are jointly examining "the prerequisites for a possible integration" of Disney+ into active AGF measurement. All quotations in this article are translated from German by PPC Land.

Julia Schörner, Vice President of Disney Advertising for the GSA region (Germany, Switzerland and Austria), framed the move around the size of the service's German audience. Disney+, she said, reaches "a broad audience in Germany" with series and films from brands including Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, Hulu, FX and ESPN.

"For us it is therefore important to make this usage more visible and easier to classify for the advertising market as well," Schörner said. "Together with AGF, we are now examining the possibility of implementing active measurement of Disney+ in the future."

Kerstin Niederauer-Kopf, who chairs AGF's management board, put the emphasis on the rules rather than the brand. "Disney+ is an important part of the German video market," she said. "The fact that we are now jointly examining the prerequisites for an integration under the rules of the AGF measurement standard takes us further on the path to more comprehensive video measurement."

She then set out the broader aim. "Our goal is a shared, independent market standard for video - across all distribution channels. For that we need transparent rules and comparable data that providers, agencies and advertisers can rely on."

The phrasing is careful on both sides. Disney speaks of a "possibility" to be implemented "in the future"; AGF speaks of "prerequisites" and of integration "under the rules of the AGF measurement standard". The direction of travel is clear enough. The burden sits with the streaming service, which would have to meet AGF's standard, not the other way round.

What AGF measures, and for whom

AGF describes itself as a company for neutral video research that continuously and quantitatively records how video content is used in Germany. On its website, the company says "Total Video" is its universe and that it supplies an open market standard for the media and advertising industry, "independent of distribution channel, time of use, place of use or device". It says it invests a double-digit million sum in that system every year, developed with its partners and in close consultation with advertisers and agencies.

The level of detail is the selling point. Under the motto "Follow the Content", AGF's website poses a question: how many women from Hesse with an Abitur, aged between 20 and 29, who own a garden and a pet, watched the news on TV and in the broadcasters' media libraries last Thursday? "AGF knows," the page answers. "Because we measure reach. Every day, every hour, every second."

AGF's figures serve as the trading currency of German television: the numbers buyers and sellers agree to transact on. AGF operates as the country's joint industry committee for video, and its rules are written down. According to AGF, a catalogue of conventions sets out the rules of its research system, including how the data is further calculated and the rights and obligations attached to handling it. Continuous TV audience research in Germany began in 1963, according to the company.

Ownership matters here too. According to AGF's organisation page, its shareholders are ARD, Discovery Communications Deutschland, Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, Sky Deutschland, SPORT1, VIMN Germany (part of Paramount), WeltN24 and ZDF. Disney is not among them. A streaming service entering AGF measurement would therefore be entering a system built and governed largely by the broadcasters it competes with for German video budgets.

Active measurement: the Prime Video template

The word "active" carries most of the weight in the announcement. AGF has run this process once before with an international streamer, and the sequence offers the clearest guide to what the Disney+ review could involve.

Passive first, then active

In September 2024, AGF began working with Prime Video. The first step was passive. Prime Video usage was captured through AGF's GfK router measurement in the AGF panel, which recorded the total reach of the whole Prime Video offering on the big screen. According to AGF, that method could not separate the different parts of the offering, because such a breakdown needs the providers to cooperate. At the same time, AGF said it was examining with Prime Video whether the platform could be fully integrated - a stage that closely resembles where Disney+ stands today.

The active stage came about 13 months later. On October 28, 2025, AGF announced that Prime Video's ad-supported video-on-demand would enter its standardised measurement from November 2025, using server-to-server technology with Nielsen as technical service provider. Prime Video sends usage data to Nielsen, which merges it with the AGF panel and census data. Reporting runs down to title and format level, with target-group analysis still possible. AGF described it as the first time a joint industry committee anywhere had brought an international streaming service into its standardised measurement using server-to-server technology.

Not everything moved across at once. Active measurement initially covered only ad-supported viewing, and co-viewing - several people watching one screen - remained under development for a later phase. AGF also warned that router-based and active results may differ, because the router captures all content, including ads and trailers.

Step by step

The integration then widened. On June 19, 2026, AGF said it would add live sports events on Prime Video to its standard, starting with the Wimbledon Championships at the end of June. By PPC Land's count, roughly 14 months separated AGF's first Prime Video announcement in September 2024 from the first active data in November 2025, and another seven months passed before live sport was added.

Set against that record, today's announcement is thinner. It does not mention a passive data stage, a technical provider such as Nielsen, a server-to-server feed, or which parts of Disney+ would be measured.

What the announcement leaves out

Several questions remain open, and each would shape how useful any eventual data is to buyers.

Timing. There is no target date, not even a year. The announcement describes integration as "possible" and as something for "the future".

Scope. Prime Video entered AGF with its ad-supported viewing only. The Disney+ announcement does not say whether a review would cover the ad-supported plan alone or the whole service. According to Disney's own description of the service, Disney+ outside the United States carries general entertainment under the Hulu brand and global sports content from ESPN. Whether live sport on Disney+ would fall within scope, as it eventually did for Prime Video, is not addressed.

Method. No technical partner is named, and nothing is said about how Disney+ usage would be fed to AGF or merged with its panel.

Audience figures. Schörner refers to a "broad audience in Germany" but gives no number for subscribers, ad-supported reach or viewing time. For comparison, Amazon told its first German upfront on June 4, 2025 that Prime Video had an average monthly ad-supported reach of more than 17 million customers in the country.

Does a review of this kind ever fail? The announcement does not say what happens if the prerequisites cannot be met, and AGF gave no indication of how long the examination itself would take.

How Disney+ is measured in Germany today

Disney+ is not unmeasured in Germany. It is measured differently. In November 2024, Disney signed AudienceProject for independent campaign measurement in Europe, starting with the UK, Germany and the Nordic countries. On January 21, 2026, AudienceProject activated a direct Disney+ integration across five European markets - the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain - covering reach and frequency for campaigns.

The buying side has moved too. Since June 2025, Disney+ inventory has been available through Amazon DSP in markets including Germany, via the Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange. And Nielsen's Ad Intel CTV tracking, which launched in Germany in August 2025, lists Disney+ among the 11 streaming platforms it monitors for advertising activity, alongside Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube, RTL+ and Joyn.

Each of those tools answers a narrower question than AGF does. AudienceProject measures how a campaign performed; Nielsen's Ad Intel tracks which ads ran where. Neither puts Disney+ viewing into the same audience currency that German broadcasters trade on every day. That is the gap Schörner's remark about making usage "more visible and easier to classify for the advertising market" points at.

Why German buyers are watching

The German video market has been shifting toward streaming for some time. A Bitkom survey presented in September 2024 found that 87% of Germans aged 16 and over stream films, series or TV shows, narrowly ahead of the 86% who watch broadcast TV via cable, satellite or antenna. Nielsen's Media Use Study, published in June 2024, put weekly streaming use at 77% of Germans, with Netflix and Prime Video each reaching 56% weekly and Disney+ at 29%.

Broadcasters' own revenue mix shows the same pressure. RTL Group's digital advertising revenue rose 27% in the first half of 2025 while its traditional TV advertising revenue fell 6.9%, as PPC Land noted when Zattoo handed its German CTV ad sales to Ströer in June 2026.

For agencies, the practical issue is comparability. A plan that combines broadcast TV with Prime Video's ad-supported on-demand viewing can now be built on one German standard. A plan that adds Disney+ still has to combine AGF data with Disney's own figures or with a third-party study. Netflix's ad plan is also measured in Germany through AudienceProject's direct integration, one of six markets covered.

Other joint industry bodies have taken different routes with the global streamers. In the UK, Barb has reported reach and time spent viewing for platforms including Disney+, Prime Video and Netflix since November 2021, using router meters for aggregated platform data. Barb's channel-level YouTube reporting ran into a different problem in January 2026, when Google sent cease-and-desist letters that forced Barb to pause it. In Australia, Netflix's ad-supported plan is set to enter OzTAM's VOZ currency database from February 1, 2027, according to an OzTAM announcement on November 2, 2026.

The contrast with the UK case is instructive. Barb's YouTube channel reporting measured a platform that no longer subscribed to Barb, and it stopped when the platform objected. AGF's model, as the Prime Video integration shows, depends on the platform supplying data from the inside. That makes Disney's cooperation the precondition rather than an obstacle - and it explains why the announcement comes from both companies jointly.

Niederauer-Kopf's stated aim, a standard "across all distribution channels", can only be reached one provider at a time. Today's review puts another international streamer on that path, without yet adding it to the data.

Timeline

Summary

Who: AGF Videoforschung GmbH, the Frankfurt company behind Germany's standard TV and video audience measurement, and The Walt Disney Company through Disney Advertising. Julia Schörner, Vice President of Disney Advertising for Germany, Switzerland and Austria, and Kerstin Niederauer-Kopf, chair of AGF's management board, are quoted.

What: The two companies are examining the prerequisites for a possible integration of Disney+ into AGF's active measurement. Disney Channel and the National Geographic channels are already part of AGF's linear TV measurement. No date, technical partner, method or scope was given.

When: The announcement was made today, November 4, 2026. Prime Video, which AGF integrated in 2025, took about 14 months from its first AGF announcement in September 2024 to active data in November 2025.

Where: Germany. The review concerns the German market and AGF's measurement standard, which German broadcasters, agencies and advertisers use to plan and trade video advertising.

Why: Disney says it wants Disney+ usage to be more visible and easier to classify for the advertising market. AGF says it is working toward a shared, independent market standard for video across all distribution channels. For buyers, inclusion would let Disney+ be compared with broadcast TV and Prime Video on one German standard instead of through Disney's own data or third-party campaign studies.