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TiVo to Give Away TV Ratings
Digital TV and DVR pioneer TiVo has announced that its TiVo Research audience measurement division will provide free TV ratings from the first quarter of 2016, in order to 'celebrate' comScore's forthcoming acquisition of Rentrak.
 comScore announced last month its intention to buy film and TV measurement firm Rentrak in a $732m deal, creating a new giant in cross-platform measurement. TiVo says it will celebrate by giving its ratings out for free, explaining: 'We don't think anyone should have to pay for the most basic data we provide - demographic TV ratings. We're much more interested in helping you improve your business and overcome the real challenges you face in a way that other sources of ratings data never will. We do this with anonymized individual household-level viewing data from more than two million homes, directly matched to online exposure and purchase data'.
The TiVo Research division, which is led by former Crossbeam Media President and erinMedia co-founder Frank Foster, was formed three years ago when TiVo acquired media measurement and analytics firm TRA. Its Media TRAnalytics technology collects second-by-second tuning data from set-top boxes, household purchase data, and household demographic data. TiVo Research's algorithms then check, edit, filter, and weight that data, match it at the household level, and then measure and analyze it to help clients generate customized reports.
In separate news, cable TV firm Comcast is reportedly in talks with media conglomerates and audience measurement specialists about licensing viewer data on its set-top boxes. According to the report in the Wall Street Journal, Comcast is also said to have rebuffed a $100m offer from Nielsen for an exclusive license for its data.
Web site: www.tivoresearch.com .
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