A week after the Fox Television Stations group signed a long-term deal with Rentrak to provide audience ratings for all of its local markets, CBS this morning announced a deal to expand a previous, more limited agreement. The expansion adds CBS West Coast flagship station KCBS and Los Angeles independent KCAL, marking the first stations in L.A. -- the nation’s No. 2 market -- to use Rentrak’s local ratings service. In March, CBS announced an agreement with Rentrak that covered local TV ratings for four of its markets. The new deal brings the total number of CBS owned stations using Rentrak’s ratings to nine. In addition to L.A., they cover stations in Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Pittsburgh. CBS executives cited Rentrak’s ability to deliver “advanced automotive demographic” ratings as part of the reason for the deal with Rentrak. Last week’s Rentrak deal with Fox runs deeper than just developing a supplemental source of audience estimates, according to executives familiar with the deal, who said it was also driven by a fallout between Fox and Rentrak rival Nielsen over methodological changes in its local ratings, as well as contractual ones. In response to that coverage, a Nielsen spokesperson provided the following statement: "Nielsen has a rich history with Fox working on all aspects of media measurement -- traditional, digital and qualitative. We continue to offer metrics, developed with world-class measurement science, upon which the media and advertising industries transact with confidence. We believe that the evolution of the business and the creation of new and innovative ways to measure the market are essential to the long-term growth of the industry. As we are doing this fall with the launch of the first true cross-platform product which will roll mobile TV measurement into the television ratings, we will continue to adopt new measurement technologies and data sets as they improve to the point where they meet our high standards."