OpenTV says that it will open up its TV measurement platform by publishing formats for its key data points which it collects to measure audience viewing. If everyone is working with the same data points then it could give rise to innovation and automation in audience measurement.
This will let the developer community, as well as data analysis partners, integrate with the OpenTV’s measurement system and build personalization features, addressable and interactive advertising, content addressability, and other value-added services.
Initial participants in this program include Advantage, Nielsen, Rentrak and TNS, all specialists in either collecting or analyzing audience and research data on TV consumption.
OpenTV’s Measurement Solution is part of OpenTV’s Core2 middleware platform and allows collected click stream data to be anonymized either by storing only rollup data, or by applying privacy filtering at the time of data send-back.
It allows advertisers to see how long viewers watch ads before zapping or fast forwarding. It also measures the less watched TV channels just as accurately as the most watched, something notoriously tricky when using TV panels and such.
Meanwhile NDS and TNS Media Research announced an enhancement to their joint TV audience measurement offering, adding the ability to identify individual viewers in homes that have agreed to participate on a measurement panel.
It is a combination of the NDS Dynamic audience measurement system and TNS’s RaPiDView analysis service, and they say it will help TV operators better understand audience behavior by collecting and analyzing data about individual viewers as well as information at the household level.