• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 14, 2009

The CBS and CW affiliates in the Wichita, Kan. market will use set-top-box data provided by Rentrak as a ratings source.

Rentrak obtains the second-by-second data from AT&T U-verse homes. It then molds it into a local-measurement service -- an alternative to Nielsen.

The Rentrak system is known as StationView Essentials, and the Kansas stations run by Sunflower Broadcasting are the first customers. U-verse has been available to homes in the Wichita market for over a year.

The Rentrak service allows the stations and advertisers to gauge commercial ratings. But apparently only during programming viewed live -- not time-shifted or with the help of a DVR. Furthermore, the data is believed to be only at the household level -- there are no demographic breakdowns attached to it.

Nonetheless, advertisers may warm to the "live-only" data, since Nielsen recently discontinued that stream in local markets, angering at least two large buying entities. Rentrak has been offering a similar national TV measurement service based on second-by-second data for some time.

Sunflower, which operates the CBS and CW affiliates and another station in the 69th-largest DMA, has inked a multi-year deal with Rentrak. Wichita is a Nielsen dairy market. Sunflower is part of Schurz Communications.

"We selected Rentrak after carefully evaluating the measurement capabilities of StationView Essentials," said Joan Barrett, president and general manager at Sunflower Broadcasting. "We believe that we will now be able to provide more accurate and timely data to our customers with a household measurement size that is larger than what we have been using."

Rentrak competitor TiVo has also been trying to break into the local station measurement business. It has launched a service in the San Francisco, Orlando and Tucson markets, although it is unclear if it has any stations signed up. TiVo offers an opportunity for the measurement of commercial viewing in time-shifted mode. Nielsen does not offer commercial ratings in local markets.

With the TiVo service, data is gathered anonymously from TiVo subscribers using pools of 75,000 in San Francisco, 10,000 in Orlando and 5,000 in Tucson. However, TiVo data also does not provide demo breakdowns, only viewing at the household level.