As Hollywood and Madison Avenue debate how best to measure traditional TV and online viewing, TiVo plans to roll out new research that combines both.
Next month TiVo will begin tracking how much time users spend watching Web content on their TV sets alongside regular TV shows, giving advertisers and content producers a clearer picture of consumers’ viewing habits.
Subscribers to TiVo’s set-top box can watch traditional television, as well as stream online content from Netflix, YouTube and other services to their TV sets. The company also operates an audience measurement service that aggregates data and reports consumer behavior anonymously to clients such as TV networks and advertisers.
TiVo’s data is likely to reverberate through the $70 billion TV ad business and the growing online video business, including sites such as Hulu, which is reportedly planning to go public this year.
The development also heightens the competition between TiVo and Nielsen, the predominant TV ratings agency, which is set to add online viewing to its traditional TV panel in February.
Nielsen, which is in the midst of preparing an initial public offering, has come under fire for not keeping pace with emerging viewing habits. In smaller local TV markets, for instance, the company is still reporting TV viewership by asking people to fill in paper diaries.
Last year a group of big media companies and marketers set up an industry group to push for change and potentially create a rival to Nielsen. However, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement has made little progress.
“We now have the ability to say people are spending X amount of time watching broadcast, Y watching cable, either in recorded mode or live and, then on broadband, streaming versus downloads, podcasts and user generated content,” TiVo CEO Tom Rogers told The Post.
TiVo captures viewing on a second-by-second basis, which is key for advertisers who want to know precisely who is seeing their commercials. TiVo tracks some 375,000 households and has a separate service that tracks computer usage in about 35,000 homes.