Research Rivals Nielsen, comScore, Rentrak, TiVo, TNS Agree To Pool TV Set-Top Data

Some of the TV research industry's biggest competitors met Thursday in the offices of Nielsen Co.'s New York headquarters and agreed to share data and insights as part of an ad hoc group hoping to answer some key questions surrounding the value and utility of audience data generated by television set-top devices. The competitors, which included Nielsen, comScore, Rentrak, TiVo, and TNS Media Research, each pledged data, insights, and technical support to the initiative, which Havas media unit MPG organized as part of its ongoing series of "Collaborative Alliance" meetings.

"This is an opportunity to get a measurement, a new measurement, done correctly," said Pat Liguori, senior vice president of research & electronic measurement for the ABC Owned Television Stations Group, who participated in the meeting, and who is overseeing a separate initiative by the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence to understand the potential for measuring TV audiences with data from digital set-top devices.

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Liguori added it was important for the TV research industry to develop a consensus approach, and to precisely define what it hopes to develop from digital set-top data, to avoid, "what happened with Web measurement," which she said is "all over the place" and has "all these different services doing different things all with mystery algorithms. It would be very unfortunate if we do that with the set-top box."

The CRE is close to finalizing a questionnaire that will be used to examine how various set-top devices capture and report TV tuning, which Liguori said would also be a good first start for the Collaborative Alliance initiative.

Mitch Oscar, executive vice president-televisual applications at MPG, and the organizer of the alliance meetings, said the goal isn't necessary to define industry standards for digital set-top audience data, but to come up with "directional" answers that the industry can use to move forward.

"We are thinking out loud now, in a food fight kind of way," Oscar said of Thursday's discussion, which took place in Nielsen's 14th floor boardroom. "We will come back and talk to you as researchers."

The first step, he added, was getting the key digital set-top data companies to pledge to provide data. The next step, he said, would be figuring out what kind and how much data to ask for, and he said it would be up to the media researchers participating in the initiative - leading executives from top ad agencies, TV operators, and consultancies - to come back with those parameters.

One of the key issues the researchers agreed they needed to resolve was some common definitions of key terms such as "latency" and "dwell time" that are often defined differently by different set-top box manufacturers, software and analytics companies, which can result in inconsistent and incomparable data.

To help facilitate an industry consensus around the new terminology, MediaPost pledged to add a wiki application to its TV Board to enable the industry to post, define, and append terms in a public forum. Charlene Weisler, head of Charlene Weisler Media, and a regular contributor to the TV Board agreed to help develop an initial glossary and oversee the wiki.

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