• by Wayne Friedman , December 14, 2022

Vizio Holding Corp.'s Inscape, a major provider of TV measurement of automated content recognition (ACR) data from millions of smart TV sets, is now offering a “national representative panel” to reflect the U.S. population.

Since the rise of ACR data providers, some media executives have been concerned about the lack of specific audience segments/demographics -- as well as ACR viewing data not being representative of the U.S. population.

Inscape says its national panel will have “assigned demographic markers derived from anonymized households.” This, it says, will match “identity providers to generate audience attributes for age, gender, household income and ethnicity.”

This will help improve accuracy, the company says, helping to eliminate “slight differences in individual and household representation found across audience segments, and produces a data set that is largely equal to U.S. Census data across all audience attributes.”

Innovid, a video advertising platform with a connected TV (CTV) household footprint of 95 million homes, is one of the first providers to sign on for the new Inscape service.

Nielsen, the dominant TV measurement and "currency" company for many decades, has a current national TV sample of around 40,000 TV homes. It has been under heavy criticism -- especially during the COVID-19 pandemic period -- for underreporting of TV viewership.

This as well as other long-term issues, including the growth of digital media platforms, has given rise to other TV measurement providers including Inscape, 605, iSpot.tv, VideoAmp and others.

Inscape has been offering second-by-second viewership ACR data from over 21 million opted-in Vizio smart TVs. It did not immediately disclose how many homes with smart TV sets would be included in its national panel.

Inscape started up in 2008 as TV Interactive Systems, and was later renamed Cognitive Media Networks.

In 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media and renamed it Inscape.