TiVo Launches Research Unit

Digital TV and DVR pioneer TiVo Inc. has announced the creation of a research division, TiVo Audience Research and Measurement (ARM). TiVo ARM will offer advertisers and advertising agencies second-by-second data and analysis on DVR viewing of advertising content.

TiVo says the service will give the advertising community a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the types of ads that are most successful with the 4.4million consumers in its user households. The data format will allow users to compare and contrast with audience measurements from other sources, and to analyse audience and ad effectiveness by network, genre, day-part, time slot, day of week and commercial pod position. The research will include assessment and analysis of the impact of fast-forwarding, rewinding, replaying, pausing and other viewer behaviors.

Data for almost every nationally-aired commercial can be split according to when it was watched, with categories from live and 0—1 hour time shift to 7—14 day time shift.

President and CEO Tom Rogers says the improved and enhanced version of his firm's 'Commercial Viewership Reports' could 'dramatically transform the way advertising is created, bought and delivered to consumers.' The reports are based on random analysis of 20,000 of TiVo subscribers per given day, much larger than the size of most industry panels.

Among the first clients for the service are Nissan and OMD NEXT, a consortium of 14 of Omnicom Media Group's clients who have dedicated resources this year to test and learn about the relative impact of new and emerging media platforms. The latter include Bank of America, GE, Visa, Discovery Channel, McDonalds, and Anheuser-Busch.

TiVo was founded in 1997 when it led the development of the first commercially available digital video recorder (DVR). It is based in Alviso, California and is online at www.tivo.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.