• by Wayne Friedman , December 21, 2009

Rentrak Corp. has added Bloomberg Television to its list of clients for its TV Essentials audience measuring service.

TV Essentials gleans anonymous, second-by-second audience viewing patterns from more than 14 million set-top boxes in multiple media markets via the Dish Network. Other clients of TV Essentials include HSN, WealthTV, Jewelry Television, The Inspiration Network, HDNet, Sprout and the Outdoor Channel.

Trevor Fellows, head of ad sales for Bloomberg Television, said: "TV Essentials will help us to grow our advertising base by more efficiently and effectively packaging our highly targeted audience."

Rentrak is among a number of other TV research firms that would like to grab more of the business currently served by Nielsen. Second-by-second audience analysis is in high demand for many TV marketers.

Unlike Nielsen products, Rentrak's TV Essentials does not offer demographic breakdowns for specific TV programming, nor can ratings be delivered on an overnight basis. But viewer information can be integrated to other databases with demographic composition, according to research executives.

Recently, Rentrak made news by signing up Midwest TV operator Sunflower Broadcasting for Rentrak's StationView Essentials service. Sunflower recently decided to abandon Nielsen because of what a station executive said was unreliability of its audience data.

Sunflower operates the CBS and CW affiliates and another station in Wichita, the 69th-largest DMA. It is a Nielsen diary market.

Rentrak's StationView Essentials provides viewing data from top 100 markets representing the largest anonymous household viewing, through AT&T U-Verse IPTV video service.