• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 17, 2022

More old-school measurement stuff -- increased and enhanced exponentially. Walled gardens be damned!

For TVision and iSpot, this will come through an investment deal, merging TVision's panel of 5,000 TV homes (14,000) overall combined with Big Data from iSpot.tv -- the automatic content recognition (ACR) homes it gets from 15 million ACR-enabled smart TV homes via Vizio's Inscape.

The underlying premise continues to be that CTV platforms and streamers won't share crucial viewing data with advertisers. You can throw the label of “transparency” here, if you like.

TVision's key measurement efforts focus on “attention” measures around video eye-tracking technology that can show who is in the room. This is crucial to revealing co-viewing data.

As part of iSpot's investment, it gets the exclusive rights to use TVision's CTV co-viewing panel, which covers 900 publishers' and channels' platforms for its currency. 

CTV data is still a mystery to many -- especially when it comes to exactly who is in the room watching. This also puts the focus on determining still important demographics, something few if any CTV/streaming providers offer.

Other measurement providers are also in the hunt to broaden either ACR or other technologies:

Samba TV acquiring artificial intelligence (AI) company Disruptel -- whose technology can offer program specific identification and analysis;  Innovid acquiring TVSquared; and  VideoAmp supplementing its technology with in-program analysis.

This comes amidst peculation that Netflix would now open the data doors to reveal what is exactly going on at its CTV platform -- now that it has moved into the advertising-supported, albeit with a much measured approach.

To a great extent, this is not new. For years, pay TV cable operators including Comcast Corp held onto its valuable cable TV set-top-box data, even as media agencies were begging for access. The doors for releasing set-top box data have been opening a bit.

In the modern world of CTV and streaming digital media, third-party measurers see an advantage to their work when it comes to panels and ACR data-- as the media industry has done in the past.

From all of this, one wonders how publishers will respond? Will they open their server doors to reveal specific information all to curry favor with needy marketers?&nbsp

There is money to be made in the media. And data is valuable and key to its future. Walled gardens can't grow with little sunshine.