Measurement

Revision3--a company which bills itself as "an actual TV network for the Web," and which produces its own original, broadcast-quality programming--announced Tuesday that viewership of shows on its service climbed to nearly 1.5 billion minutes for 2009 (it says its shows were viewed nearly 70 million times during the year) and that, despite the recessionary economy, its revenues grew 30%. The company also said that, on the ad sales side, it "increased its average deal by 50%" and added such major brands as Klondike, Ford, Adidas, Coors, Patron, Nokia and Panasonic to its brand advertising roster.

TAG Networks--an interactive TV games company that has developed a games-on-demand channel, called TAG, which it says integrates with existing VOD infrastructures (note: the company has a history of working closely with ActiveVideo Networks and is involved in the latter's deployments with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision)--contacted [itvt] Tuesday to let us know that new TNS data, measuring daily time spent viewing per set-top box, show that the TAG channel topped 43 linear channels available through Time Warner Cable's Hawaiian arm, Oceanic Time Warner Cable, for the most minutes viewers spent watching.

Kyte, a San Francisco-based company that offers a social-enabled broadband and mobile video platform for live and on-demand content (note: it bills its platform as "combin[ing] the real-time, interactive and community building capabilities of the social Web with professional-grade analytics and content management features, enabling businesses and organizations to engage online and mobile audiences and build community around their brand"), on Tuesday launched Kyte Console 2.0.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

Here is a round-up of some other interactive TV-related stories we didn't have room for in this issue:

Interactive TV and advanced advertising technology provider, OpenTV, announced Tuesday that it will open up its TV measurement platform by publishing, later this year, the format of key data points that its software is able to measure on the set-top box. The company says that this open access will allow the developer community, data analysis partners and other service providers to integrate with its measurement solution more easily, and will foster the creation of next-generation set-top box services with enhanced personalization features, such as addressable and interactive advertising and content addressability.

Interactive TV and conditional access technology provider, NDS, announced Wednesday the launch of NDS EPG Framework. According to the company, EPG Framework is an end-to-end infrastructure that enables broadcasters to design, deploy and manage their own EPG's cost-effectively, and also gives operators the flexibility to update the EPG as needed and to introduce new revenue streams via EPG-based ads and promotions. NDS says that a number of its customers, including Get, Viasat and Bharti Airtel, have already started using EPG Framework.

VOD technology provider, Concurrent, on Wednesday launched a cross-services data storage and correlation solution, called Central Data Warehouse (CDW), which it says is designed to offer a 360-degree view of linear, VOD and interactive media consumption across TV, mobile and PC screens. The company bills the CDW as the industry's first centralized data warehouse solution to allow broadband operators to consolidate the collection, storage and correlation of census-level media data from linear broadcast, VOD and online video viewing, facilitating a "secure and seamless exchange of consumption data among media industry stakeholders."

Multiscreen media measurement and research company, Rentrak, announced Tuesday that VOD viewing set a record in July with 655 million transactions, surpassing the previous record--which was set in June--by 11%, and representing a 19% increase over the same month last year. The company--which offers a VOD measurement service called OnDemand Essentials--also said it measured a 15% increase in the number of unique set-top boxes accessing VOD. In addition, the average number of minutes per day spent watching VOD increased, the company said, and the proportion of VOD-enabled set-top boxes accessing on-demand content increased to 47% in July.

Rovi (formerly Macrovision--for more on the company's name change and the repositioning it heralds, see the interview with Rovi chief evangelist, Richard Bullwinkle, that was published on itvt.com, July 16th) announced Wednesday that it is partnering with TNS Media Research to develop advanced TV and set-top box measurement solutions.

DVR vendor/service provider, TiVo, announced Tuesday that it is partnering with Quantcast, a company that provides a Web-audience measurement service focused on enabling addressable advertising, to offer advertisers and media companies a comprehensive cross-platform audience-analysis solution that will evaluate the correlation between TV viewership and online activity.

Multiscreen media measurement and research company, Rentrak, announced Monday that it has published its "Rentrak State of VOD: Trend Report 2008." According to the company, the 25-page report, which is priced at $495, is based on data from January 2007 through December 2008 that was gathered by its OnDemand Essentials service. The company claims that that service--which it bills as providing operators, content providers (including broadcast and cable networks and studios), and advertisers with a transactional tracking and reporting system--has processed over 17 billion VOD transactions to date from its operator partners.

DVR vendor/service provider, TiVo, announced Thursday that it has signed a deal with the National Basketball Association (NBA) that sees the latter using TiVo's interactive TV advertising solutions to promote the NBA finals.

At the NAB show in Las Vegas Monday, DVR vendor/service provider, TiVo--in what appears to be an attempt to challenge Nielsen's dominance in the local ratings space--announced StopWatch Local Markets, a version of the company's StopWatch audience ratings service that provides anonymous, second-by-second, year-round ratings data for programming and commercials in local US television markets (note: StopWatch collects its research data from TiVo boxes; TiVo recently announced that it would expand the size of the service's sample from 100,000 to 300,000 boxes--see [itvt] Issue 8.23 Part 2A).