Fisher Signs With Rentrak

People-TV

Seattle-based Fisher Communications becomes the latest TV station group to sign on to Rentrak's growing TV measuring service.

Rentrak's StationView Essentials service provides TV analytics with the hope of increasing advertising sales. For many executives, the Rentrak system is becoming a rival competitor to The Nielsen Company, especially in local market TV measuring products.

This brings the total number to 45 stations in 24 markets that have subscribed to Rentrak's TV database. In a release, the companies call the Rentrak system "currency" -- which it hopes to be code for the ability to get paid from media agencies for the marketers' commercials.

The Rentrak system is available in all 210 markets.

Fisher Communications owns and operates 13 full-power television stations, 7 low-power television stations, and 8 radio stations in the western United States. It will be using Rentrak in its CBS, Fox and CW stations in Bakersfield, CA, and its Yakima/Tri-Cities markets.

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Randa Minkarah, senior vice president of business development for Fisher, said: "This will allow our clients to more fully appreciate the value of television and become even more successful in reaching their customers."

Recently, Rentrak signed a deal to incorporate data from cable operators Charter Communications, allowing it access to more set-top-box data. Charter has around 4.8 million cable homes.

For both its national and local-market STB-based viewership services, Rentrak also relies on set-top-box data from satellite programming distributor Dish Network and telco video programming distributor AT&T's U-Verse.

For some time, Charter had been offering STB data from 300,000 homes in the Los Angeles market to Rentrak and other data providers.

1 comment about "Fisher Signs With Rentrak".
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  1. John Grono from GAP Research, August 25, 2010 at 5:06 p.m.

    I was wondering whether someone 'in the know' (I'm from Downunder) can tell me whether the Rentrak data is household tuning data or people's viewing data? I'd be wary of a 'currency' that was just tuning and with no demographic indicators.

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